IN REVIEW: Weezer - "Everything Will Be Alright In The End"

Weezer's ninth album really wants to be the grand return to form it's being marketed as. It goes so far as to explicitly state its intentions as such in lead single Back To The Shack (which, if you want to take solace in something, is by far the worst song on the record), wherein primary songwriter Rivers Cuomo professes a desire to be "rockin' out like it's '94". Of course, there's an inherent natural problem with the approach; expressly attempting to recapture a decades-old feeling and chemistry can't help but come off as disingenuous regardless of how well it's executed.

Everything Will Be Alright In The End does everything it can to get the goodwill of critics and fans back. Producer Ric Ocasek is back in the fold to help the band rekindle some of the rock fire that they burned with during their iconic first two albums and sporadically since. The band themselves still remember most of their old tricks, and use these callback triggers with reckless abandon.

That's not to say it's all derivative pandering; indeed, Weezer do try a few different sounds on for size, most notably on the disco-turned-rock opera (guess by the thirteen minute mark Rivers forgot, again, that disco sucks) I've Had It Up To Here and the acoustic-tinged historical epic The British Are Coming, which is silly as hell but charming in its earnestness. That's not to mention the stormy and melancholy Foolish Father and the wild stylistic shifts found in album-closing, mostly instrumental monster The Futurescope Trilogy, both legitimate highlights.

Where the album misses its mark is in its lyrics. Not that this has ever been Cuomo's strong point, but this album has a song that channels all his career frustrations using lines like "don't want my ideas polluted by mediocrity" directly following a song that willfully rhymes dance with chance, try with die, sad with bad, and lonely with homely. It's especially frustrating for a lyrics guy like myself because the lyrics are the only area where Weezer's attempted comeback falls on its face.

Whether or not silly lyrics like "ain't got no one to kiss and hug me" are a deal breaker depends on your eyes' tolerance for rolling repeatedly over a short span of time, I suppose; I'm just saying, I was on board with mid-album foot-tapper Da Vinci until Rivers started referencing Rosetta Stone and ancestry.com (and rhyming the latter with mom, of course). There's a line in the song's chorus that sums up the album's lyrics for me: "I couldn't put it in a novel / I wrote a page but it was awful".

Even still, EWBAITE emerges as Weezer's best record in a decade by a country mile. Granted, that statement says less about the record and more about the four that preceded it; as far as I'm concerned, this group hasn't released a good album since Maladroit in 2002, and even that gets difficult to defend by times.

Suffice to say, EWBAITE isn't an insufferable, indefensible mess, but it's no triumphant return either. Instead, we get something in the middle; it's the result of a band that ventured so far off course and did so much damage to their own cause that they simply can't make it all up in 42 minutes. It's admittedly a step in the right direction, though, and I can't stress enough how nice it is to hear this band truly and honestly giving a shit about the music they're creating, because it was starting to feel like those days were gone forever.

October 7, 2014 • Republic

Highlights The British Are Coming • Foolish Father • The Futurescope Trilogy