Do you ever look around you and see all the death and destruction and the constant bad news and feel hopeless? “What’s to be done? What can I do? What can anyone do?” you wonder.
Well, not Rivers Cuomo. Rivers looks at climate change, cops killing black people whenever they feel like, Israel doing an ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and the millions and millions of pandemic deaths, and he decides “I can make this worse.” And then he releases another Weezer album.
For those of you counting, this is the 847th Weezer album and the second released this year. That’s right, the second this year and we’re not even halfway through the motherfuckin’ year. The so-obnoxiously-titled-it-should-be-illegal OK Human came out on January 29th and it seems like a good chunk of music-reviewing types decided its cross between boring modern Weezer and orchestral music made for one of the band’s best turds since the much-lauded 636th album, A Very Weezer Turdsgiving. Not me, though!
Not four months later, we’ve been gifted the sweet, stanky gift of another Weezer album, Van Weezer. Did Rivers write and produce a whole new album in threeish months? Yes. No, not really. Van Weezer has actually been finished and festering a good long while now, but it got delayed what with the covid ‘n’ all that. But the pandemic is totally over now and no one is dying anymore so we need to get this thing out stat.
The title and kakadoody cover art (up there in the header image) may have clued you into the gimmick of this one: it’s Weezer, but with a lot more of a heavy metal sound, in homage to the lousy metal music Rivers listened to in his youth and still loves a lot, so he says. Does that advertising hook come through in the actual sound of the album? I mean, yeah, I guess so, kind of. Fine, yeah, sure, who cares.
Let me tell you all about it now. Why? Well, ever since Weezer entered their post-Pinkerton era, colloquially and medically known as “Bad Weezer,” I started reviewing every single shitey album, first on a website that nobody ever saw that is dead and gone now and then on my YouTube channel that nobody watches. Why? Look, I’ve explained this before, but, fine, let’s go over it one more time: I was cursed by a mischievous forest spirit (his name is Alex) so I have to. Okay? Right, then.
So does Van Weezer rock like the cheese metal of old? To an extent, yes. Let’s keep in mind that the cheese metal of old was really fucking cheesy. It’s very quaint to listen to Black Sabbath these days and hear the gentle, tightly-constructed lamewad pop these boys were cranking out that once so seized the elderly with a moral panic. So, yeah, that stuff doesn’t seem entirely out of place on a Weezer record and even pre-Bad Weezer (the era colloquially called “Weezer”), there were flirtations with metal. Like, as I recall, Rivers says the solo from “Tired of Sex” is more or less lifted from some metal bastards. I’d try to look up who but my goal is to write this in under an hour.
But, yes! Van Weezer rides the metal hog a little harder and more regularly than Weezer typically does, though usually in very brief spurts that it then abandons. Several tracks on this album pull a thing of starting with a rockin’ mean metal opening that then quickly gives way to lame Rivers’ whiny pop wailing. Some of the songs return to the metal bits again, but the overall effect is less that they’ve finally merged Weezer and heavy metal perfectly in equal measure, and more like Rivers keeps putting on his metal hat at specific moments and then taking it off again.
Yeah, the gimmick helps the album stand out in the Bad Weezer era, but not really as much as (puke emoji) OK Human did because, as mentioned, Weezer and metal have always been at least semi-intertwined and, more than that, they’ve even gone full-tilt into this cheesy metal shit before. Everything Will Be Alright in the End closed out with three tracks dubbed “The Futurescope Trilogy,” roughly 7 minutes of wanky metal nonsense that sounded like the music from the first level of Gitaroo Man except much longer and not as good. I am not sure why Rivers thought we (and/or he) so needed Van Weezer to return to his metal roots or whatever because he’s done that shit whenever he felt like it plenty of times before.
Rivers seems to go through these phases of needing to remind everyone (and/or himself) that, yes, Weezer, is, in fact, a rock band. Like when he shat out “Back to the Shack,” a song that blows untold chunks and tells us he “forgot that disco sucked.” The fuck are you talking about, man? Funny thing is, his periodic renewal of his rock vows is always much ado about nothing because, with the exception of his occasional truly weird departures (“Love is the Answer” off Raditude springs to mind), all the music comes back to the bland, forgettable Weezer pop sound that has defined Weezer all of post-Pinkerton. Fine, Maladroit is kind of okay.
And the same is true of Van Weezer. Yeah, it’s “that one that’s a bit more metally” just as OK Human was “that one that’s got string instruments ‘n’ aw, innit?” but the bedrock of these songs, as it’s been since time immemorial, is functional, wussy pop-rock with lyrics predominantly about girls that are cooler than other girls delivered by Rivers’ modern, weak warble (still don’t know what he did to his voice to make it lamer after Pinkerton). Like pretty much all the previous albums, it comes in at a tight 30 minutes (a feature I do very much appreciate), as though to suggest that these records are all created in a factory, up to code, hitting the exact specifications required to qualify as an album of music.
Also like a lot of modern Weezer, despite Rivers’ mathematical, spreadsheet-driven song composition, some songs veer off wildly on tonal tangents that add up to the song just feeling like a damn mess. This happens on “The End of the Game,” for example, which, surprisingly, is a single. But, then, they’ve put other silly tonal messes out as singles before, e.g., “High as a Kite” (yes, most of the song is normal, likable Weezer pop but that bridge sure goes all kooky). Also, as has always been Bad Weezer’s wont, there’s some lyrics on here that are so dumb you’ll be forced to stop and ask “what the fuck did he just sing to me?”
I originally intended to briefly go through the album track by track, but I’ve decided I don’t have to! I’ll mention two though. The second track, “All the Good Ones,” is just “Beverly Hills” again and I’ve even seen a professional music journalist say the same thing, so I’m not crazy. And “Blue Dream” takes the iconic riff from Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” (yes, literally takes it; Ozzy gets a songwriting credit on the track) and builds a new, much lamer song around it. “Crazy Train” was already a pretty wussy song, so Rivers did what many of us have always thought might be a cool idea, taking the best bit and building a new song almost exclusively around it, but he managed to make an even wussier and far worse song. You really screwed the pooch on this one, Rivers!
So let’s leave it there, shall we? I was being melodramatic and rude to suggest at the top of this review that Rivers has contributed a notable harm to the world. Really, this is just another mediocre Weezer album like the 844 Weezer albums before it. In the grand pop scheme of things, it will have no sustaining legacy, either good or bad. It’s just the one that’s got a bit more metal in it.
Rating: *sound of wailing metal guitars on a bonfire as they succumb to the flame* out of 5