(DGC Records/Interscope/Universal)

Geek rock veterans return with mixed success

Few artists have managed to project their adolescent musical fantasies with as much enthusiasm and dignity as Rivers Cuomo. As frontman and chief songwriter for Weezer, the ageing Cuomo still lets out his inner Beavis & Butthead through the utilisation of glossed-up bedroom riffs, polished and multi-tracked to perfection on this new album by production heavyweights Jacknife Lee and Rick Rubin. As a result, Weezer is one large-scale cult rock act that owes more to Kiss and Cheap Trick than Teenage Fanclub or Guided By Voices. It’s an approach that has worked extremely well over the years, but is relived with mixed success on this latest self-titled album, which due to its similar artwork to multi-platinum debut The Blue Album and the later Green Album, is already known as The Red Album. The record gets off to a cracking beginning, with the first three tracks all superb – Troublemaker is surging Weezer rock at its most anthemic, The Greatest Man That Ever Lived is a Bohemian Rhapsody-styled epic and a fun reminder of Cuomo’s love of pomp rock, while Pork And Beans is one of those cracking power pop singles the band do so well. The rest of the album rarely relives those heights, being bogged down by mid-tempo MOR ballads, Smashmouth-styled frat boy rock and the awful rap-metal pastiche Everybody Get Dangerous. For the highlights, Weezer earn a few extra points, but this is far from their greatest achievement.

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MATT THROWER

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