Weezer – Van Weezer
Release Date: 7th May 2021
Label: Atlantic, Crush.
Stream/Order
Genre: Rock, Pop, Metal, Alternative.
FFO: The 80s.
Review By: Séamus Patrick Burke
Weezer, y’all are exhausting, y’know that?!
More often than not, Weezer has you asking the same question whenever they drop a new album or single, “Who is this for?” Frontman/songwriter Rivers Cuomo is quite fond of dabbling in other genres and working with outside collaborators, not afraid to stray from his band’s usual template of witty yet sensitive alt rock. It’d be laudable if it didn’t frequently produce ridiculous results.
Were Weezer fans clamoring for a Lil Wayne guest spot? Or sitars? Or chamber pop? Or covering Toto? It wouldn’t be so annoying if there weren’t occasional glimpses at artistic depth, like 2014’s Everything Will Be Alright In The End or the (let’s be real) overrated Pinkerton. But records like those are so few and far in-between that maybe it’s safe to assume that trend-chasing and pastiche really is what Cuomo would rather be doing. Maybe there really is no “there” there and we all just expect too much.
But that brings us to 2021’s Van Weezer, and Weezer doing an 80s metal pastiche is one concept that doesn’t come completely out of the blue. Cuomo has stated on numerous occasions that he took a lot of cues from 80s metal (KISS is even name-checked on the classic “In The Garage”), and Weezer has arguably already made nods to that decade with 2002’s Maladroit, which for our money is one of the best post-Pinkerton Weezer albums. It had more lively playing than the strict pop rock of 2001’s Green Album while still being identifiably Weezer. With the passing of Eddie Van Halen himself last year, there was no better time to release a tribute to that bygone era.
And, admittedly, the album has a lot going for it during the first half. “Hero” is a rollicking opener with bright, glossy riffs and energetic drums from Pat Wilson. Opening single “End of the Game” even opens with hammer-ons and pinch harmonics inspired by the late VH himself before getting to the usual Weezer pop hooks. It still has Cuomo’s cringe-worthy lyrics (“You got my crying like when Aslan died”), but at first it looked like Van Weezer would accomplish all the goals it set out to achieve.
…And then you hear the riff from “Crazy Train”.
“Blue Dreams” opens up the second half of the record and unambiguously begins with the riff from Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train”. Ozzy, Randy Rhoads, and Bob Daisley are even credited as co-writers of the song. And, sadly, this broke the spell. It makes one ask why they aren’t just listening to Blizzard of Ozz (i.e. actual 80s metal) instead of this, like how Star Trek Into Darkness copied Wrath of Khan so much that it makes you wonder why you aren’t just watching Wrath of Khan.
A quick look at the songwriting credits only makes things unravel further. The members of Asia are credited on “I Need Some of That” because Cuomo decided to sample “Heat of the Moment” during the intro (thought that riff sounded familiar). “Sheila Can Do It” contains an interpolation of “Girls, Girls, Girls” by Motley Crue. The weirdest one however is easily “Beginning of the End”, which samples “For The Longest Time” by Billy Joel. Because that’s what your 80s metal tribute needs, right? Samples from Billy Joel? One can only imagine how confused Joel himself was when they called him up to secure the rights.
This whole exercise finally reveals that Cuomo’s entire songwriting process is imitative, not innovative. The press back in the day was fascinated by his, shall we say, “methodical” process of writing songs, charting out Green Day and Nirvana hits and trying to determine on a mathematical level what made them a success. At the time, it seemed novel. In hindsight, it may have hinted that Cuomo has no artistic voice of his own. He reveals no emotion in his songs because he has none to put in them. Any time he has, he’s run screaming in the other direction. He dabbles as he does in other genres because he’s uninterested or unwilling to stand by any artistic vision he might have.
In the end, Van Weezer is inoffensive, and certainly doesn’t try the listener’s patience like Weezer’s other genre experiments (the short length helps). Then again, at least those experiments had Cuomo and his collaborators actually writing their own music instead of just rotely copying what came before them. Suddenly, just releasing more covers doesn’t seem so bad.
(2 / 5)
