Based on first-day sales, Hits is predicting that Weezer’s red self-titled album will move about 150,000 copies in the coming week, a total that’s good enough to give Rivers Cuomo and Co. the No. 2 spot on the coming week’s album chart. What’s the predicted No. 1, you might ask? More »
From time to time, we like to round up the all-important, all-summarizing last sentences of the biggest new-music reviews. Under consideration in this installment is the latest self-titled effort by Weezer, which hits stores tomorrow, is also known as The Red Album, and continues the band’s journey toward the land of cool dad-dom:
The director of Weezer’s “remember that thing on YouTube? wasn’t that funny?” video for “Pork & Beans” speaks about his, ahem, “inspiration” for the clip: “When I heard ‘Pork and Beans,’ I loved its non-conformist message and felt like it was a natural anthem for the self-expression that’s been… More »
The video for Weezer’s “Pork And Beans” is now online, and it’s basically a goof on the E-list stars of the Internet video age: Tay Zonday, Chris Crocker, K-Fed, Miss South Carolina, the Numa Numa Guy, and Dramatic Chipmunk all make appearances with the band, in what I guess is supposed to continue Weezer’s “we are totally messing with all of you” shtick and double as some sort of metacommentary on “fame” in the current era. (You know, like the MTV Video Music Awards! Except with fewer headache-inducing jump cuts.) Personally I think the funniest thing about the clip is how the version streaming from Weezer’s YouTube page is unembeddable on outside sites, but I suspect that particular quirk is actually the result of Universal Music Group’s walled-garden policies regarding YouTube and not something that was painstakingly overthought out by Rivers et al. Embedding enabled! There goes the humor value. Clip after the jump.
Many people find it hard to tell the great from the godawful when it comes to 21st-century mainstream rock. To help figure out which is which, here’s “Corporate Rock Still Sells,” where Al “GovernmentNames” Shipley examines what’s good, bad, and ugly in the world of rock and roll. This time around, he observes a few shake-ups on the normally staid Modern Rock and Active Rock charts.
My personal feeling about Weezer is that they made two of the best rock albums of the ’90s, two good albums that traded lyrical coherence for good hooks, and Make Believe, a near-abortion that revealed how lucky we were to have Rivers Cuomo babble about hash pipes and dope noses instead of starkly announcing “We Are All On Drugs.” “Pork And Beans” has a Blue Album-worthy chorus hook and distortion pedal push, but the lyrics are a pretty embarrassing attempt to seek sympathy for his “uncool” songs. Now “Heart Songs” offers a star’s sequel to “In The Garage,” name-dropping the artists who helped him throughout the gestative years of his career (before Nirvana changed his life) over a creepily tepid backdrop featuring acoustic guitar, strings and what sounds like a glockenspiel.
Weezer’s upcoming album has had its release date being pushed up from June 24 to June 3, a rescheduling that their Geffen mouthpiece is attributing to “popular demand” but that anyone who’s heard the songs of theirs that have leaked already is probably attributing to “making sure bad buzz doesn’t… More »
Weezer’s upcoming album has had its release date being pushed up from June 24 to June 3, a rescheduling that their Geffen mouthpiece is attributing to “popular demand” but that anyone who’s heard the songs of theirs that have leaked already is probably attributing to “making sure bad buzz doesn’t… More »
Weezer’s upcoming album has had its release date being pushed up from June 24 to June 3, a rescheduling that their Geffen mouthpiece is attributing to “popular demand” but that anyone who’s heard the songs of theirs that have leaked already is probably attributing to “making sure bad buzz doesn’t… More »
ARTIST: Weezer
TITLE: “The Greatest Man That Ever Lived (Variations On A Shaker Hymn)”
WEB DEBUT: May 7, 2008
