“Watch me unravel”: Charting the long decline of Weezer and where it all went wrong
It all began with so much promise, a quartet of unassuming nerds playing bittersweet power pop songs about heartbreak, family struggles and going surfing. You could easily mistake this for being a slightly inaccurate description of The Beach Boys’ early years, but we’re here to talk about Weezer, a band whose self-titled debut album was a sensation that felt like the greatest antidote to the 1990s American grunge scene.
The album, also referred to as the Blue Album, is a masterful tapestry of humorous and self-deprecating lyricism mixed with youthful angst as well as some indelible harmonic and melodic work. Weezer had a world of potential staring them in the face when they released this album in 1994 to commercial and critical acclaim, and over 30 years later, its brilliance still holds up. The same could be said for their follow-up, Pinkerton, and while it may have lacked the chart success that the band saw with singles like ‘Buddy Holly’ and ‘Say It Ain’t So’ on their first outing, it was a sign that the band were clearly onto something.
Sure, people may have found the lyricism of frontman Rivers Cuomo to be overwrought and cheesy, but they were all written in earnest by a socially outcast youngster who wanted to express himself in the only way that felt true to him. It couldn’t possibly be mawkish if there were good intentions behind the songs, and this is partly what endeared audiences to Weezer’s awkward yet staggering brilliance.
However, after the release of Pinkerton in 1996, the band vanished for five years, and many were sceptical if they’d ever return from their hiatus. During this time, Cuomo had resumed his studies at Harvard University and formed another band, Homie. However, the urge to return to Weezer as his primary outlet of creativity was clearly burning. When he reconvened with the band in Los Angeles, work began on their long-anticipated third album, which many had hoped would mark the return of one of America’s most promising young rock acts with a renewed sense of maturity.
The self-titled return, henceforth referred to as the Green Album, was good. Nothing more, and nothing less. The songs were passable, and there were a few hits scattered throughout its tracklist, such as ‘Hash Pipe’ and ‘Island in the Sun’. But they weren’t the greatest reflection of a band who had gone to college and returned as rounded individuals with more to say about the world. Weezer found themselves stuck in their youth, and the occasional introspection wasn’t enough to convince people that there had been a satisfactory evolution.
Only a year later, the band released Maladroit—a much heavier-sounding venture than its predecessor that hinted the wheels may be turning once again and that a true return to former glories was on the horizon. However, the lyrics were still a fraction too stunted, and while the warning signs of a decline may have been on display ever since the end of their hiatus, nothing could have prepared listeners for what came afterwards.
Maladroit, when you look back on Weezer’s career now, is a perfectly passable record, and while far from the pop perfection of the first two, it deserves to be separated into ‘the first part’ of the band’s catalogue. This is because ‘the second part’ encompasses a true deluge of dreadfulness—a slurry of records that seem to sequentially dig impossibly deeper into newer levels of rock bottom.
Their fifth album, Make Believe, is home to some of the band’s most dismal and uninspired songwriting in ‘Beverly Hills’ and ‘We Are All On Drugs’. Their sixth, which I’ll refer to as the Red Album, is an embarrassing slide into memetic territory, where not only did they choose to assemble the music video for ‘Pork and Beans’ from the dregs of a viral video sluice pit, but they began to transform themselves into a meme, releasing a third colour-coded self-titled album that seems like a pale imitation of the last two. If that doesn’t suggest that they’d sapped up the last of their ideas, their seventh album was Raditude—and I’d rather say no more.
There seemed to be little indication that the band were going to rescue themselves from their own mission to self-destruct, and while the rot was definitely at its worst around the mid-to-late 2000s, their recent efforts still aren’t doing much to convince anyone outside of their hardcore fanbase that a late-career resurgence is on the cards.
For every White Album, where things came within touching distance of resurrecting the band’s golden years, there’s a Teal Album, where they inexplicably chose to regress into becoming a second-rate wedding band recording covers of Toto, A-ha and TLC. For every OK Human, where Cuomo demonstrates that he can still generate an earworm, there’s a Van Weezer, an album that epitomises the phrase ‘dad rock’ in the most pejorative way imaginable.
There’s having fun—and I sure hope they’re having fun—and then there’s hurling every last shred of dignity into oblivion. Weezer may have a couple of records well worth revisiting from their earliest years, but these days, they exist as a grim reminder to other young aspiring musicians: If you burst out the gates with a song as good as ‘Undone—The Sweater Song’, you better make damn sure that you don’t butcher ‘Enter Sandman’ for a living three decades later.
