Weezer’s 2014 album, Everything Will Be Alright in the End, was a promise to Weezer fans everywhere to produce quality, mature music in the classic Weezer style — and their latest self-titled album, The White Album, fulfills that promise.
This album catches what frontman Rivers Cuomo describes as a “beach album.” With track titles such as “Wind in Our Sail” and “California Kids,” and imagery produced within these songs, — “We got the wind in our sail / Like Darwin on the Beagle” — Weezer brings the beach to the listener.
Throughout this album, the band smartly uses Cuomo’s voice. Not being a singer with an extensive range or classic grunge style, songs are crafted in a way that combine his tenor voice and a more pop-ish bounce in most songs. This serves as a complimentary combination and makes the album, running at 34 minutes in length — an easy, enjoyable listen, sonically speaking.
Another theme of this album originated from producer Jake Sinclair’s desire to return Weezer to it’s ’90s glory, his goal being to combine the “brashness” of Pinkerton and “grunge pop” of The Blue Album.
Sinclair had mild success with this, producing songs in each category. “Do You Wanna Get High?” is sonically comparable to Pinkerton’s “Pink Triangle,” with a mid-song guitar solo that would fit within any song on that album. The band alludes to this “grunge pop” with “Wind in Our Sail” and “California Kids.”
At certain points, this combination of brashness and pop fails to make a good impression. Take for instance the song “Girl We Got a Good Thing.” It begins with a strong pop influence, especially with the lyrics, “Girl, we got a good thing / You know where this is heading / Just a couple lovebirds.” But trying to combine a more brash attitude into a song that is a huge, corny love song makes this song an awkward experience.
No Weezer album would be complete without some sort of lyrical oddities. But the only glaringly weird lyrics came with the album’s singles “Thank God for Girls” and “King of the World.”
In “Thank God for Girls,” one cannot help be taken aback when Cuomo opens a song with, “The girl in the pastry shop with the net in her hair / Is making a cannoli for you to take on your hiking trip.”
This odd specificity in rather mundane details when opening a song is only present in “King of the World,” where the opening lines are, “You walk by the magazines / Sitting on the rack at the CVS / One more sad movie star divorce / Three hundred died in an airplane wreck.” With such a boisterous title, starting with the imagery of hundreds dying in a fiery crash is certainly not desirable.
It’s easy to look over these faults, however, because sonically, this album is a masterpiece. Intricate bass play, solid drumming and melodies carried by piano — something new for Weezer — help the listener to overlook any lyrical flaws in this album.
