Weezer

I was never much of a Weezer fan. Sure, I bobbed my head and hummed along to 'Hash Pipe' or 'Keep Fishin'' when they would float across the radio streams, but I never felt motivated to investigate the band any further. Well, following some recommendations from a couple of semi-reliable sources and a new-found curiosity for alternative music, I gave the band a shot.

And boy, what a trip.

Weezer's musical odyssey has been kind of like a match--a brilliant explosion of light, followed by small flickers of faintness, followed by insignificant darkness.

BLUE ALBUM: Weezer's self-titled debut is considered a classic of 90s pop, and it deserves every inch of praise. To paraphrase rock music critic Jim DeRogatis, while Howard Hawkes remarked that a great film was composed of three great scenes and no bad ones, "Weezer" provides an album with 7 great songs and no bad ones.

The album kicks into high gear immediately with 'My Name is Jonas,' followed by the wonderful 'No One Else,' then the classic deep-cut 'The World Has Turned and Left Me Here,' and then the hits start coming, with the 90s classic 'Buddy Holly' in all its retro-pop glory and then 'Undone,' which we all know as 'The Sweater Song.'

Basically, from start to finish this is great fun, with rollicking pop melodies played over crunching guitar that sounds like its about to short the amps. Beyond the music, though, is front man Rivers Cuomo, whose self-conscious lyrics of nerdy exclusion and excellent vocals bring a grand humility to the proceedings. Add to it all the closing number, 'Only in Dreams,' which is one of the great epic closing numbers in current Rock n Roll memory, and you have yourself a classic.

PINKERTON: Ah, here's where the bacon really gets cookin'. With "Pinkerton," Cuomo gets serious, shattering his adorable little image of the sensitive nerd into pieces with knee-jerk confessionals that make any emo record seem even MORE false and artificial.

While the Cuomo of "Weezer" was content to laugh at his own loneliness, our little hero of "Pinkerton" is simply tired, tired of being laughed at, tired of feeling no human connection, and tired of...sex.

While the lyrical content of the album is certainly a step into darker territory, the band has only gotten stronger, cranking up the amps to 11 and blasting into the stratosphere. Basically, "Pinkerton" is the work of a live band, with all of the feedback, distortion, and reckless abandon we can expect from a REAL live experience. From the wailing feedback that introduces "No Other One" to the raging guitars that scream into the melody of "Getchoo," the Weezer of "Surf Wax America" and "Say it Ain't So" is a thing of the past. Instead, we have honesty, depression, and legitimate anger, the kind of stuff we college kids can empathize with (Cuomo composed most of the "Pinkerton" material while a student at Harvard--yeah, he's a smart guy).

A classic, and quickly approaching a spot on my desert isle reserves.

EVERYTHING ELSE: This is where your Weezer collection should effectively end, as everything following "Pinkerton" is not worth the plastic it is digitally compressed to. When "Pinkerton" was released, fans and critics alike were outraged over the drastic change in tone from the first album to the second. Sales were terrible, radio play suffered, and major publications wiped the floor with poor Rivers (Rolling Stone famously called the album the "Worst Album of 1996"). Cuomo's reaction to all this was perfectly understandable. After sweating through the slings and arrows of the sophomore slump and emerging with an album as honest and confessional as any album of the 1990s, his beloved fan base wouldn't piss on the record to put out a fire.

So, he disappeared. Completely. And for five years, nobody heard a single note of new material from Weezer. Until 2001, when "Weezer," or, "The Green Album" was released. And trust me--it's a piece of shit. Don't get me wrong, I can understand why Cuomo would record the album. His fan base in shambles, he needed to deliver a fun, commercial album to reclaim his sales and dignity. That's all fine. The problem is that "Weezer" is simply a terrible album.

It all just sounds so lazy, like they weren't even trying. Cuomo's vocals sound bored and disinterested. His writing, musically and especially lyrically, is stilted and uninspired. The rest of the band, from the guitars to the bass and drums, sound muted. Even the guitar solos are a complete step back from the fiery playing displayed on "Pinkerton."

Yet, it still sold, prompting us to a fast-forward to today, where Weezer hasn't missed a step, releasing one album after another of commercial-inspired dreck that lacks any of the shocking originality of the band's first two records.

Aside from the band's descent into irrelevance--which is, really, annoying as all hell--there is the highly irritating Weezer fan base, a two-faced crowd if there ever was one that pisses the living shit out of me. In the present day, with Weezer a full-blown commercial outfit with no inspiration, the same people who panned "Pinkerton" now crave for the band to return to their rock/pop roots and once again produce an album along those lines--fun, catchy, rockin', and honest. Sorry, homeys, those days are long gone, are you are to blame. God damn you, you half Japanese girls!