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It would take a lot for me to ever hate on Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo, an indication how how excellent both The Blue Album and Pinkerton are.  But as I was debating with a friend over the weekend, it feels like Rivers Cuomo has never grown up emotionally or been too emotionally invested in song writing since Pinkerton. 

Pitchfork confirms this with their lambasting of Weezer’s new LP Raditude.  The album ”doesn’t have that stench of minimal calculation on it; if anything, it’s as earnest as the famously confessional Pinkerton, just written by someone whose age doesn’t match his POV. But the record’s teen-boy empowerment message doesn’t have much to offer anyone over 13 years old. Perhaps the proper fictional character to reference isn’t Peter Pan, but Matthew McConaughey’s Wooderson from Dazed and Confused– we all get older, Rivers Cuomo stays the same age.”  Ouch!

And the name of the new Weezer album is … Raditude. No joke.  I categorically hate this album before it’s even released on October 27. 

New single, “(If you’re wondering if i want you to) I want you to” has already landed on the radio.

It is impossible to remember a time when Weezer was not just a band worth listening to, but also one of the best at writing achingly catchy pop songs.  The Blue Album and Pinkerton are long disappeared into the rearview mirror.  When future music nerds debate the legacy of Weezer, surely they will insist that Rivers Cuomo should have died after Pinkerton, to cement his legendary status.  Now?  It’s just painful.

Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo brought along an a capella group for this rendition. This song just slays me every time I hear it. If it’s possible The Beach Boys may be the only group in music history that is both underrated and overrated at the same time. Pet Sounds along with a few other albums are so remarkably good that it’s easy to look past a lot of the shit they released.

In many ways this is also like Weezer. I’m convinced that Pinkerton is the Pet Sounds for my generation. There I said it. This was performed as part of Stereogum’s Decomposted series, which brings musicians into a studio to play stripped down versions of their songs. (I still think I prefer My Old Kentucky Blog’s Laundro Matinee, but whatevs)

Weezer stopped by Portland’s Oak Park Fairgrounds back on the 19th and held a good ole fashioned hootenany. The local radio station 94.7 invited like 200 people to play instruments and jam out with Rivers Cuomo.

I’ve always wondered what it was that makes Weezer so damn embraceable; they seem to want to go in the opposite direction of what’s cool and now. Their strategy for being rock’n'roll icons, for lack of a better term, seems counterintuitive. Maybe that’s their appeal, but still, you’ve got to hand it to a band that keeps chugging along and giving fans something special.

Pampelmoose was on hand to get the video of the band rehearsing and eventually covering Radiohead’s “Creep.”

Radiohead’s “Creep”

The Portland Mercury’s Erik Henrikson has a great write up about the day. Henrikson is relatable because he comes from the same place every Weezer fans does: loves The Blue Album unquestionably, bows down before the greatness of Pinkerton and then sort of wonders what happened to the band. I wish I knew. Though I don’t think any of their post-Pinkerton efforts are bad and the thing to keep in mind is that Weezer is a singles band. When all is said and done my future-kids will be listening to Weezer’s greatest hits on whatever format they will listen to music on.

On entering the pavilion, everyone gets a booklet autographed by Rivers Cuomo, Brian Bell, and Scott Shriner (Patrick Wilson, pulling a Greg Oden, isn’t around thanks to a knee injury). Inside are lyrics to the setlist: “Pork and Beans,” “Island in the Sun,” Radiohead’s “Creep,” “Say It Ain’t So,” “El Scorcho,” “Beverly Hills,” and, in addition to the lyrics on these Xeroxed pages, there are hand-scrawled notes in the margins, written in some sort of bewildering and frightening foreign language: “In the key of F# minor (after tuning town 1/2 step),” says the one for “Island in the Sun,” while “Creep” is annotated with “Chord progression: G major – B major – C major – C minor.” I ignore this bizarre stuff, and contented myself with singing, because I know four of those six songs by heart. I probably should not admit how much I enjoy singing “Hip hip!” during “Island in the Sun.” But fuck it: “Hip hip!” is fun to sing, and “Pork and Beans” is really fun to hum along to, and yes, “Beverly Hills” is a terrible fucking song, but it’s still a great song to stomp your feet along to, provided, I guess, that it’s Rivers Cuomo telling you to do the stomping, and there are 200 other people, aged 11 to 40, all around you, equally excited about doing the same thing.

Damn, I wish I was there.

Is it time to call Chris Hanson from NBC’s To Catch a Predator and set up an intervention with Weez frontman Rivers Cuomo? It might be too early to tell, but judging from this strange video for the single “Blast Off!” from his uneven solo album Alone: Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo 1992-1997(the highs and high and the lows are pretty low), Cuomo’s choice of facial hair, mixed with his choice of a YMCA-like gym to get himself pumped leaves us feeling a little icky.

Oh well, the song rocks balls and only makes us wish Weezer had released the shelved album Songs From the Black Hole, from whence this song was originally recorded for.

Rivers Cuomo, frontman for Weezer, has been busy lately prepping both a new Weezer album and a batch of solo material.  The solo stuff was all recorded between 1992-1997.  Head over to his myspace page where you can hear the first song, “Blast Off.”  The song sounds like classic Weezer, unlike say their last three releases.

Maybe there won’t be hope for the next Weezer album, but maybe Rivers’s solo adventure will supply the fix we’ve all be looking for.

Via: Stereogum

Throw those Weezer signs into the air. The band you love to “hope will put out a good album but invariably will fall short of your expectations because Pinkerton was so damn good” have announced the release date for their sixth studio album.Pitchfork is reporting that “album six” will be released on April 22, 2008 and will be leaked probably a few weeks before that.

“Weezer fans truly have something to look forward to,” gushed Weezer bassist Scott Shriner about the new Weezer album on the Weezer website. “The entire band has accomplished some of its most challenging goals as a group and as individuals. It’s all coming together on this album.”

You’ll forgive us for not holding our breath. Alone: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo, which supposedly has an Ice Cube cover– lands December 18 via Geffen. But you already knew that.

Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo has ended his educational sabbatical.  We know that since the summer Weezer has been hard at work on their sixth LP and when not doing the the musician thing, Cuomo was fast at work penning his first autobiography.

That book was supposed to be released this winter, but according to Filter Magazine, the tome is approaching Tolstoyian proportions at 400 pages.   The book has been shelved by the publishing house until completion, but Geffen Records plans to release an album full of Cuomo solo material this December.

Alone – The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo will slide nicely into an Weezer fans’s collection on Dec. 11, put probably as a nice little stocky stuffer.  The even better news is that all the  recordings took place from 1992-1997, which coincides with the time period known as the “creatively awesome era” in the Weezer canon.  In case you were wondering the “creatively awesome era” saw the release of The Blue Album and Pinkerton, respectively.

Everything after that has just been bullocks.   You can check him out on Myspace where he made the casual announcement.