Weezer (Teal Album)

One of my favorite concert experiences of all time was seeing Weezer live.

No, friendly viewer, it wasn't because I enjoyed the groups music, please don't get ahead of yourself like that.

During the concert I suggested that they would open the concert with one song in particular and ended up being right (it's been years and I promise I couldn't replicate the magic, so I will not try to attempt it). I then got confident and tried to guess their second song, a much harder task to pull off compared to the opener to a concert, and once again was correct. At this point I thought, there is no way I could keep up something like that because it just doesn't make sense, but why not try?

I was successful for seven straight songs. Someone not a fan of Weezer was able to accurately guess the seven songs they would play in a row during their concert.

I tell this story not just to fill up space in a review, as rarely do I need any bells and whistles to make that happen, but for a purpose. Weezer are by nature a very formulaic group; the ultimate nerds of rock music who figured out the blueprint to making a catchy song and replicate it in their own way. Their entire career encompasses nearly three decades of them being goofy but somehow just memorable enough to be both gimmicky and quality. Even if I've never considered myself a fan of the group I can't deny the size of their biggest songs, even if those songs are rock recipes rather than revolutionary takes on music.

Their aptness for turning music into a procedural process rather than a largely inventive one makes The Teal Album perhaps the most apropos album of their career. A collection of covers is not ever going to be a groundbreaking experience, to be certain, but Weezer take the experience of a covers album and boils it down to its most basic parts so concisely that it could be one of the worst full recordings I've ever heard. These aren't even really covers at all and feels more like sitting at the bar, three drinks deep, watching the biggest douchebag in the room make a big scene doing karaoke because he thinks everyone is having fun.

I know you might think, hey karaoke can be fun, but maybe you've never been to karaoke at a bar before. No one gets up out of their seats for someone replicating something, and when you go to karaoke people more often tune out and sit there or even laugh at the comical end of performing these songs. One time I saw a guy do the worst possible version of Crawling by Linkin Park I had ever seen and then my friend was so drunk she made out with him. Let me tell you now that it was one of the most unnerving but absolutely hilarious things I've ever seen.

The Teal Album reaches for fun but lands on formula. The group barely change anything about the songs, outside of perhaps No Scrubs which is the most obnoxious version of the song imaginable. Even Paranoid, which is a sore thumb on the record, sounds like a bad mix of the Sabbath version and doesn't really have any Weezer in it at all. To consider these covers is almost a disgrace to the idea of a group taking someone's popular song and putting their own spin on it. There is no spin here, it is just Weezer singing along to the tune of someone else's song; it's like someone made an 80's mixtape but accidentally grabbed all the Kidz Bop versions. It's boring, it's unoriginal, and no I just can't say it's fun.

Do I think this is a serious album? No, of course not. I don't think that the group are trying all that hard to make something different from the originals, because if they were they sure didn't do a great job of it. My major gripe is that it's even in an album format at all at this point in history. Make them YouTube videos and put them into a playlist. Throw a cover or two at the end of your original album as a bonus track. Hell, throw these songs into your live performance so I can't guess the first seven songs you're going to play. But wrapping all these dull and lifeless "Weezer Does Karaoke" songs onto a full half hour experience is the group questioning how much our time is worth. Which is probably an ironic statement coming from the guy who just spent all this time talking about that very album, but what are you gonna do.

Favorite song: Take On Me