Weezer - Weezer (or, The Blue Album) (1994)
You can’t write about Nevermind without talking about grunge. You can’t discuss King Crimson without saying prog. No overview of either Oasis or Blur could be complete without reference to the battle for Britpop glory that dominated their early history, despite how different they were, and how little either cared for the crown. Some albums are so synonymous with a certain sound that it becomes impossible to write a retrospective without taking this into account. This can prove frustrating for the artists themselves, as almost all of these musical buzzwords are the pigeon-holing brainchildren of journalists, and a lot of the time these buzzwords place far more focus on the look of a band than its sound.
Unfortunately for Weezer this proved to be the case, for when their debut album emerged in 1994, the pigeonhole parade took one look at the cover and cast them as Nerd Rock until their dying days. Within their sound may be contained the gain-heavy power chord freak outs of Pixies, the sweetly acoustic serenading of Cat Stevens, and a fair few stripped-down solos stolen from the glory days of Glen Danzig, but despite all of this, they wore glasses. Not only in public, but on stage, and in music videos. In addition, not a single one of their songs was about drug addiction – no winking references to spoons, no reports on visits to Dr Greenthumb, not even a passing mention of anything brown. Indeed, it seems that when lead singer Rivers Cuomo chimes about how much he enjoys hanging out ‘In The Garage’, it’s less for its hot-boxing potential and more about an irony-free desire for Dungeons and Dragons and X-Men comics.
Wherein lies Weezer’s main appeal on their debut ten-track pop masterpiece: as with all great music, it’s incredibly honest. All the best musicians find new ways to convey where they come from, be it NWA's Compton, Bob Marley's Trench Town, Arctic Monkey's Sheffield, or even Sun Ra's Outer Space (or so he claimed...). In Weezer's more terrestrial case, however, it was all about Suburban Nowheresville, Connecticut. No band who puts a couplet like ‘Come sit next to me, pour yourself some tea’ in the opening song of their first album could be aiming for street-cred, and it would almost be embarrassing to sing along to on the bus with your headphones were it not for the magic of Weezer: they sang infectiously catchy songs that make you not care about how lame you may look dancing to them, because you’re having too much fun. They would often recall the crooning pop numbers of Buddy Holly, with a modern post-Pixies adherence to loud-quiet-loud that gels perfectly - take the distortion out of ‘Holiday’ and you’ve got the sound of a hit 50’s 7 inch. From Holly to glam rock, at its best the Weezer sound is a compendium of every music that late-20th century teenagers have put on in their bedrooms and turned up loud for the pure joy of rocking out, free of inhibition.
What differs ‘The Blue Album’ from the later, suckier work of Weezer on albums like ‘Make Believe’ is the subtle blend of angst and insecurity that infuses ostensibly happy numbers like ‘In The Garage’, and conversely the notes of hope and optimism that run through more miserable titles like ‘The World Has Turned and Left Me Here’. Latter-era Weezer1 are a little too content to wear their emotions on their sleeves, picking one feeling per song from the emotional spectrum and sticking to it, but the Weezer of yore had a wonderful way of making sad songs sound happy, and vice versa.
Thus, the success of ‘The Blue Album’ is a simple formula: ten perfectly crafted pop songs, from bouncy 3/4 opener ‘My Name Is Jonas ‘ to the dreamy walking bassline that fuels closing 8 minute wonder ‘Only In Dreams’, that encapsulate the main advantage of being a nerd: the ability to enjoy cheesy nerd things without giving a shit. And that’s pretty cool.
Interesting side-note: The influence of this album has stretched far and wide, to bands as bizarrely un-weezer-ish as Deftones and Biffy Clyro, who have both covered tracks from this album – it is certainly worth checking out the latter’s rendition of ‘Buddy Holly’ as an example of artistic license gone magnificently insane. Remember that episode of ‘Family Guy’ where Peter turns a production of ‘The King and I’ into a war epic about robots from Space? This is the audio equivalent of that:
Track list:
2. No One Else
4. Buddy Holly
5. Undone - The Sweater Song
6. Surf Wax America
8. In The Garage
9. Holiday
10. Only In Dreams
1 Weezer can be divided into several eras, beginning with the Golden Era of their first two albums, 'Blue' and 'Pinkerton', the latter being oft-cited as the most influential of their records, even if this writer prefers the former for having a bit more variety. The middle period consists of their next two albums, 'Green' and 'Maladroit', which are both fantastic, but on a slightly lower pedestal from the first two just because they didn't have quite the same wide-reaching impact on the indie pop canon. After this comes the Latter Era, when they somehow lost it and became, in the desire to beat the bush directly, a bit wank. Despite this, these later albums have enough good songs between them to make one great mixtape, and I would even argue that the 'The Red Album' was a minor throwback to the quality of the middle period, were it not for the lyrics on tracks like "Heartsongs" that sound like they were written by a drunk pre-pubescent Donnie Osmond and which ruin an otherwise marvellous set of melodies. ↩
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