Weezer's latest mixes styles
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By GLENN GAMBOA / Newsday
The half-life of Weezer’s musical styles is shrinking exponentially. The shifts used to occur from album to album. On “Make Believe,” the band’s previous album, it balanced two styles — peppy power-pop, including the hit “Beverly Hills,” and melancholy ballads.
Now, on Weezer’s latest eponymous album, nicknamed “The Red Album” (Geffen), the band jumps genres from song to song, sometimes even within the same song, part of its apparent wrestling with what being a rock band means and whether they want to continue doing it.
The epic “The Greatest Man That Ever Lived” moves from a Coldplay piano opening to power-pop to a chorale bridge to a metal breakdown and back to power-pop triumph in less than six minutes. “Dreamin“’ is similarly sprawling, moving from carefree pop to concerned rock to aspirational folk to punkish rebellion.
It’s the album’s more straightforward cuts that work best, though. The clever twists on the familiar-sounding “Pork and Beans,” a song about rebelling against the music industry’s hit-making conventions, is so catchy it has already become a smash.
On “Heart Songs” Rivers Cuomo declares his fanboy love of a far-flung list of other people’s hits from Joan Baez and Eddie Rabbitt to Nirvana and Slayer before realizing that Weezer now fits into the category of “These are the songs I keep singing.”
With “The Red Album,” Weezer’s members seem to accept their position as alt-rock pioneers, while staying determined not to be constrained by it.
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