 Don't Believe It Weezer's uninspired new tunes won't win any converts
The intro to the video for "Beverly Hills," the first single from Weezer's new album, Make Believe, features Playboy tycoon Hugh Hefner, flanked by three cooing, peroxided women. He's on the phone inviting drummer Pat Wilson and the rest of the band over to the mansion, provided they "don't bring too many dudes." A wild party on the lawn ensues, with hotties and hardbodies frolicking vapidly as the band play on. All the while, despondent-looking Weezer front man Rivers Cuomo laments being excluded from the high life as it giggles and high-fives all around him. He wishes he could live in Beverly Hills, he lip-syncs, "rolling like a celebrity."
So begins the new Weezer album, with all the conceptual depth of I Want to Be a Hilton, steeped, maybe, in irony. But it's hard to tell. Who, exactly, is relating this sad tale of the outsider looking in? Rivers Cuomo, with his 11-year rock career, world tours, guitar techs, appearances on Saturday Night Live, videos featuring Hugh Hefner, etc., would seem to qualify, by most standards, as a celebrity. Granted, he's no Hef, so maybe it's just that he wishes he were wealthier.
But this isn't really the Rivers Cuomo speaking in the song, right? It's the speaker, the narrator, some fictional projection, not the singer-writer himself. That said, the scuffling, self-deprecating persona in Cuomo's songs has always seemed, well, not like a persona at all. In Weezer's original bio from 1994, Cuomo relates: "At 18, I freaked out and moved to Los Angeles to become a rock star. I soon realized that I was an idiot and gave up. At the same time, my girlfriend broke up with me. I was really sad and started to write songs. Most of them sucked, but it became a habit that stuck with me." This certainly sounds like the voice from all those bummed-out songs—and that those girls still won't talk to. In "Beverly Hills," he sings, "I didn't go to boarding schools; preppy girls never looked at me" (apparently not even while Mr. Cuomo was attending Harvard between albums).
Just as Rodney Dangerfield's comedic persona kept making people laugh long after we knew he commanded not only our respect but that of other celebrities around him, Cuomo's rumpled, bespectacled persona is still as magnetic in its anti-charm as ever, even if the themes have worn a familiar groove. Like Dangerfield, albeit with a much different style, Cuomo looks the part of the perpetual outsider. It's just that the whole act is starting to feel a little tired.
"Beverly Hills" is more or less a retread of "El Scorcho," the ne plus ultra of Weezer's repository of nerdy serenades (from the band's 1996 album Pinkerton). It has similarly loping drums, a similarly wincing guitar lick and a similarly self-deprecating pseudo-rap punctuated by a chorus of big, loud vowels and stomped-on distortion. But where "El Scorcho" eventually built to a surprising, breakneck, Green Day-inspired bridge (fitting, given the song's lyrical reference to the band), "Beverly Hills" just keeps plugging away and repeating itself ad nauseam—which has been the problem with Weezer's music since they resurfaced with a retooled lineup after several years out of the limelight.
The band's newer material is relentlessly verse-chorus, with little variation. The basic song structures feel decorated, rather than arranged or fleshed-out. Missing are the hair-raising bridges, segues and tangents that made their self-titled debut and Pinkerton so great. There are no equivalents to the squealing, soaring guitar that introduces the final chorus of "Buddy Holly," or to the polyrhythmic, knee-buckling snare drum triplets in "The Good Life." Or to the choral homage to the Beach Boys in "Surf Wax America." The list could go on.
It may just be a coincidence, but because his departure marks the end of a discernable era in Weezer's creativity, perhaps founding member Matt Sharp is the missing link. No disrespect to his replacement, Scott Shriner, but Sharp was a special kind of player, a commanding presence in the mix. Whether he was arranging the songs or just radiating some ineffable creative influence, since he left the band and left his heart in Barcelona, Weezer haven't been the same.
By all accounts, Sharp hasn't, either. Some time after dropping off the face of the music world, he moved to a small town in rural Tennessee. According to a statement on his new record label's site, he had been "looking for a place that was far away from everyone, a place to think, a place to breathe, a place to write and record some very slow and sad music. It was a strange and dark time in my life."
Whether Matt Sharp was the defining element of Weezer's greatness (or whether Weezer's greatness is a thing of the past) is a matter that no amount of debate will settle. Being young with nothing to lose and everything to prove often turns out to be the real secret to being a great band, rather than the contributions of any individual member. A decline in that energy, or at least a change in it, is inevitable. That Weezer are still a very good rock band is undeniable, but there's something absent from their newer material, and it isn't celebrity. |
