Album Review: Weezer - The Black Album

Let's dispel a notion; Rivers Cuomo was never great. He had a brief moment when he wrote songs that caught people's attention, and he helped start a movement that turned into a cadre of hipsters whining about their bullshit problems, but he has always been an immensely troubled songwriter. "The Blue Album" made people smile with the nerd image and "Buddy Holly" video, but underneath the surface were already clues that Rivers should have been kept at arm's reach. The depths of his lyrical genius were found as he wrote about having a Kitty Pride poster on his wall, or lamented a fraying sweater. He referenced Kerouac, which was an apt comparison. Like "On The Road", Weezer was ushering in a movement where reciting the minutia of the day-to-day was considered art, when it was really laziness.

I love "Pinkerton", as most awkward people around my age tended to. I still listen to that record, and I can get caught up in the angst that record captured. But let's not pretend Rivers was worth praising at that point in life. He was a miserable bastard writing miserable bastard songs, rattling off lists of women he either had sex with or wanted to have sex with, fetishized a letter from a barely of-age girl from Japan, and skirted the bounds of homophobia on "Pink Triangle". And all of that was during his 'good' phase.

Things only got worse as Rivers grew older, and couldn't cope with it. He chased trends, grew a porn 'stache, and wrote songs about being terrified of spiders (though I do like that tune), and how cheese smells on burnt lamb. Put it together and you get a portrait of a man who, fifty years ago, would have been shamed into a Howard Hughes type of seclusion. Rivers can come up with catchy melodies. That is his only redeeming feature, as his discography with Weezer has proven to us time and time again.

And so we reach "The Black Album", the well-titled nadir of a career that has been sinking for half of my life.

If it wasn't for the fact Rivers has already written an even worse album in the form of "Raditude", this would be the key piece of evidence at the trial formally judging him no longer worth giving a damn about. As he has told people, he writes some of his songs by gluing together random lines he has written in notebooks. Keep that in mind when he gets to "blah blah blah" at the end of the chorus in "Zombie Bastards". He has copious lines he's been waiting for years to use, and he couldn't even fill out three more syllables in a song they RELEASED AS A SINGLE.

Rivers started his career talking about having a KISS poster on his wall, and then ripping off the solo to "Rock You Like A Hurricane". We are a far cry from those days, as he has fully sold out to the modern machine. These songs are glossy pop. Sure, they're played with more real instruments, but there isn't anything other than River's voice and insanity to tie this to any previous stage of Weezer's career.

"Let's do hard drugs," River opens "Piece Of Cake" singing. That's an apt metaphor for the record, since a state of mental impairment is needed to think this is anything other than a pathetic grasping at youth by someone who refuses to grow up. If Rivers was a man of more means, I can imagine him as batshit insane as Elizabeth Bathory, bathing in the blood of Weezer fans who are virgins to hearing good music.

For a long time, I was able to overlook some of Rivers' obvious issues, because he was able to write some great hooks. Let's dispense with that; there isn't a single good tune on this album. Even if you thought "The Green Album" was a formulaic, emotionless exercise in writing by spreadsheet (which it was), it was simultaneously more rocking, more fun, and more honest than this outing. "The Black Album" has only one thing supposedly going for it; Rivers now swears!

If ever there was a statement that shows how far Weezer has sunk, it's that they feel the need at this age to start saying "fuck" to give themselves some edge. "Island In The Sun" was like deathmatch wrestling compared to this.

Just when you think Weezer can't get any worse, they find a way to crush your soul even harder. At this point, I'm ashamed the band ever meant anything to me. "The Black Album" is a black hole of talent and creativity, a cosmic vortex of suck that eats everything alive. I've said it before, and I probably won't stick to it this time either, but Weezer is dead to me.