The album feels like a departure: with its soft orchestral balm and sweet melancholic undertow, OK Human offers a singular, complete listening experience unlike anything else in their catalog.
These moments of light and shade are everywhere on OK Human, and in addressing them Weezer have made one of their most catchy and insightful records to date.
Orchestrated, analogue, packed with typically smart, reliably unshakeable River Cuomo compositions, this is Weezer's social media/lockdown-atuned Pet Sounds.
OK Human is an oddity and a warm digital hug; it's Weezer reacting to an endless, nerve-shredding, social-life-destroying period of isolation the way only Weezer can, drawing further inwards to themselves but somehow inviting us along for the ride.
What a lovely surprise from a band who are becoming increasingly more marmite as they near their third decade as a band.
With 12 tracks and a runtime of barely more than half an hour, any flaws are minor and the album breezes by. The arrangements may be ambitious, but there's very little pomp or grandeur here; this is just another low-stakes success in a long and varied career.
OK Human isn’t just a pleasant surprise, it’s a genuinely good album that shows off a lot of Weezer’s best sides in a way that’s been missing of late.
A swooning, orchestral pop record that’s elegant, yet intimate and has become a document of Cuomo’s life during Covid times; the anxiety, the isolation, but also a sense of calm.
Weezer's 2021 output is off to a great start with OK Human.
Fresh out of gimmicks, Weezer think outside the box and deliver their most sincere album in years with OK Human.
2016’s ‘White Album’ was genuinely good - at least by the standards of modern Weezer - and ‘OK Human’ is most certainly their strongest offering since ... A touch less polish, and some might even be suggesting Weezer were back on form.
Face-masked, Abbey Road-recorded orchestral sessions embroider some wonderfully imaginative conceits, Cuomo's trademark wryness dialled-down a tad as he focuses on tuning-out doom, isolation with his family, and his concerns about using literature to escape/self-medicate.
It should remind Weezer’s doggedly loyal fanbase that the singer’s ear for melodicism remains second to none—and when the musical accompaniment rises to meet the challenge, as it often does here, it’s a testament to why we keep coming back.
It’s Weezer’s attempt at pathos (or bathos in Cuomo’s case) that makes OK Human feel, well, more human. If Cuomo could ever let his guard down fully, without feeling self-conscious, he probably has a great album inside of him.
Weezer has always had heart, and OK Human shows the value of taking time to record instead of filling the silence with countless tours and albums. Weezer is finally taking risks outside of the formula that has worked so well, and they still have a lot of mileage left in them.
By focusing on minutiae ... what is ostensibly a lockdown album (hello, reference to Zoom interviews) avoids cliche.
The record isn’t groundbreaking material, but it’s definitely nice to have a new Weezer album that isn’t trying to recreate their old material and instead looks to the future of their sound.
Despite the creative and cultural headwinds into which it was released, OK Human lands as a surprisingly charming collection of pop tunes whose imperfections add to rather than detract from the experience.
The guitar heroes have – gulp – ditched the guitars for a bold new direction. The result is an evocative, intimate record that'll make you pine for the old world.
Weezer’s greatest misses may come from their frontman’s visceral desperation to stay relevant, but it’s a relief to hear them take chances and risk failure in such a new way.
Rivers Cuomo pays tribute to his hermit orchestral-pop heroes, name-checking Harry Nilsson, Serge Gainsbourg, and Pet Sounds. But of course, it's all Weezer in the end.
Weezer’s maddeningly inane lyrics sometimes work, but they aren’t doing much to move the needle here. At least the album sounds nice, as that’s more than you could say for plenty of previous albums from Cuomo and the gang.
After 25 years of burying his inner demons with stacks of California anthems and odes to girls who got hot, Cuomo is seemingly unable to produce the raw melancholia that once spilled from him in a way that was messy but compelling. OK Human is mostly just messy.
When they’re bad, they’re bad ... and unfortunately, OK Human consistently misses the mark with persistent mediocrity, and humdrum quarantine monotony that never offers anything outside of watered-down proclamations.