Weezer- 'Weezer (Red Album)'
(Interscope, 2008)
Rating: 7

Few people in rock are as hard to get a proverbial bead on as Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo. Even as he approaches 40, he remains alternative rock's reigning l'enfant terrible, a figure as capable of provoking sincere admiration for his unique songwriting merits as outright WTF? bewilderment at the ways in which he occasionally plies all of that talent. Weezer began their career with two classic yet diametrically opposed albums, with the glossed over guitar ebullience of The Blue Album contrasting nicely with the raggedly invasive introversion of Pinkerton. In the years and albums since this near perfect double-shot of an opening salvo, Weezer's catalogue has zigged and zagged in accordance with Cuomo's fancy, with wildly varying results. If the overall quality of Weezer's output has suffered with the rapidly expanding quantity of releases since their de facto comeback, The Green Album, Cuomo and company have still demonstrated an ability to unearth the kind of melodic, guitar-driven pop/ rock gems that marked their earlier efforts via tracks like Hash Pipe, Dope Nose, and We Are All on Drugs. Their latest release, The Red Album, advances itself in much the same way as all of their later releases, as it once again captures the dichotomy of highlighting the band's power even as it experiences a few outages along the way.

If Rivers Cuomo's finely tuned ear for melody and a combination of pop hooks and full-on rock riffs has largely defined Weezer as a musical entity, it's the machinations between his ears that have continued to make his band interesting as he continues to merge the antisocial ethos of his bespectacled inner teen with the anti-rockstar charisma he has come to possess. The Red Album may prove to be Cuomo's most outwardly autobiographical album since Pinkerton, though the tones that populate each album are highly dissimilar. Cuomo kicks off the album with an ode to himself via Troublemaker, in which he lauds the practice of "doing it my own way" and pretty hilariously nails my painfully boring existence, errrrr, the pratfalls of suburban 9 to 5 dystopia in the way of "marrying a byatch/having seven kids/giving up and growing old and hoping there's a god" that he has cleverly avoided. The track is classic Weezer in the way in which choppy chord progressions yield to a building of layers during the chorus, and the frontman's overt displays of self-confidence lend the song extra vitality while pointing the lyrical direction in which the rest of the album follows. If Troublemaker sounds an opening bell in which Cuomo comes out swinging in the name of former nerds cum rock gods everywhere, The Red Album's second song, The Greatest Man That Ever Lived (Variations on a Shaker Hymn) throws an early knockout punch in which Cuomo begins by announcing "You try to play cool like you just don't care/ but soon I'll be playing in your underwear". If that sounds like a couplet more akin to something in Trick Daddy's catalogue than anything on a Weezer record, that may be because Cuomo breaks into a twangy rap at various points of the track. Cuomo doesn't merely confine himself to the rap genre on The Greatest Man, though, as he somehow manages to charge headlong into doo-wop, opera, pop punk, synth pop, and a random piano recital on what may be Weezer's most schizophrenic song in nearly two decades.

In listening to The Red Album, it's difficult to ascertain if Cuomo is truly mocking himself or his fans/observers, though it's probably a mixture of both. The lead single, Pork and Beans, conjures Make Believe's Beverly Hills while extending the confrontational bent of the earlier songs via a chorus in which Cuomo asserts "I'm a do the things that I want to do/ I don't have a thing to prove to you" before loudly invoking a coda consisting of the words "I DON'T CARE". Cuomo dials down the hyperbole a bit with Heart Songs, which emerges as one of his more seemingly sincere songs in which he traces his evolution through the artists and songs that inspired him to make music. The track is simple and straightforward, and it's cool to hear Cuomo namecheck his influences, especially as he describes coming into possession of Nirvana's Nevermind and hearing Smells Like Teen Spirit for the first time. Ever the schizoid, the singer then gives another nod to hip hop with Everybody Get Dangerous over a guitar line that functions more as a backbeat before enlisting a chorus in which he gives a shout-out to Stuart Scott (point for all you emo nerds who get that reference) in the form of the interjection "BOO-yah". Again, as Weezer have evolved and Cuomo has grown more comfortable with his leading man status, it's become tricky to demarcate the line between showmanship and unbridled honesty. In the case of Cuomo, either phenomenon could be attached to his work, but that quandary reflects the dilemma that occasionally punctuates the stronger moments of Weezer's recent catalogue while preventing their sustainability. For now, though, Cuomo remains an intriguing figure, and the album eventually yields a grab that perhaps escapes first blush. The three lead numbers by his bandmates prove much less interesting (no Dave Grohl-like transformations in their collective future), as Weezer's highs and lows continue to be defined by the vision Cuomo imparts in parts.

- Brant Miles