Credit: Found On Internet

It must be tough being a Weezer fanboy. After keeping their fans waiting an epoch between the career-creating Weezer (aka The Blue Album) and Pinkerton, they’ve subsequently started a slow downward trajectory from The Green Album onwards. Let’s be honest – by the time they got to Make Believe, you could feel your IQ points falling off whenever you listened to ‘Beverley Hills’ and ‘We Are All On Drugs’. It might’ve looked like Weezer, and even sounded a bit like Weezer, but hold any of it up against ‘Only In Dreams’ or ‘Buddy Holly’, and it seemed to fall laughably short.

So it’s three years later, and we’ve got this: Weezer (aka The Red Album). And while it feels like a step in the right direction, that’s all it feels like – a step. And not out of laziness, but out of indecision about where to go. While Weezer mainman, Rivers Cuomo, might not have turned on his audience, he seems to have turned away from himself and started reflecting his rockstar take on the world at us. Cuomo is writing songs as the Frontman Of Weezer, rather than writing as Cuomo, the man who connected with the alt-rock kids.

The lyrics of lead single, ‘Pork and Beans’ – “I’m gonna do the things that I wanna do, I ain’t got a thing to prove to you” might on the surface feel like a middle finger to musical fashions and trends, but after a few listens it starts to sound like petulant college-rock foot-stomping. “I don’t give a hoot about what you think” starts to sound like the mantra of a man desperately trying to convince us, and by extension himself, that he’s happy enough in the rut he finds himself in.

The video for ‘Pork and Beans’:

It doesn’t end there – album opener, ‘Troublemaker’ is a wry eyebrow raised over rock star mythologists, clearly bourne of Cuomo’s own position as the untouchable talent of US alt-rock. ‘Heart Songs’ is a love song to the music of his formative years. And despite their obvious polish, they couldn’t feel more at arms length. It feels like I’m being told ‘Look! Look! This is how it is! Idiot!’