Weezer

Weezer (Black Album)

The Black Album feels like the most fully realized latter-day Weezer album: it may flagrantly draw from old and new elements of pop culture, yet it belongs to its own feverish world.

Their recent uptick in form had been supported by successfully channelled home comforts, but on Black they sound fully invested into exploring, and more than capable of handling, a new pop sound.

On the innovative Black Album, the pop-rock greats serve us a selection of well-evolved bangers.

With the band remaining prolific and energized, is it that interesting to spend so much time thinking about a 25-year-old masterpiece? Maybe it’s more important that Weezer’s idiosyncrasies feel honest again.

It’s a great - albeit mis-matched - collection of songs.

The LA band have made a wilfully goofy album whose jokes wear pretty thin, pretty fast – though this is a largely solid alt-pop record nonetheless.

The band’s 13th album portends a musical change-up, but its core is still precise, poker-faced pop-rock.

At times, the Black Album feels like an awkward band trying to hang out with ‘the kids’, at others, it feels like a brilliant mind trying to work out where it fits in the modern world.

This striving for the new and different comes at a cost. There’s no emotional throughline on The Black Album, no grand statement that continues from one track to the next. The songs never blur together, but they also don’t tell a story as the sum of their parts.

As uneven and muddled as it can be, The Black Album gets one clear message through from Cuomo to the thirty- and forty-somethings who loved him in the ‘90s: thanks for everything, but it’s time we all moved on.

This is the most disjointed record in Weezer’s discography. Its probably not the worst but its right there with Raditude and Make Believe.

To the extent that it adds new wrinkles to the Weezer formula while still sounding every bit like a Weezer album, you can call this a smashing success. But to the extent that anyone would ever use this music as the backdrop to a night out—sans irony, anyway—well, that’s much more debatable.

Cuomo shrugs as he jumps from one middle-aged errand to the next, hoping to plop back to his bed so he can go back to daydreaming about the Pacific.

Overall, Black Album is a weaker release by a band that seems to be lacking direction. Despite some catchy highlights, too many songs are skippable with uninteresting music and empty lyrics.