Amidst the scathing reviews pouring out recently for Weezer’s perplexing new album Raditude, August Brown of the LA Times might have nailed it best.
Brown writes that Rivers Cuomo’s “late-career pursuit of mindless, opulent fun is so transparent that it almost taps a deeper vein of interior sadness than anything on Pinkerton.”
I couldn’t agree more, especially the “mindless” part.
On Ratitude, Cuomo aims his lyrical focus squarely on the minds of southern California teenagers while they vacantly dream of rap video riches (Can’t Stop Partying), babes (The Girl Got Hot) and just hanging with the homies (Let It All Hang Out) at the mall, as represented by the Pat Wilson-penned song In the Mall.
Rivers, who’s staring down 40, must have ordered Wilson to follow him down Juvenile Road.
Why Cuomo insists on writing an album of such little substance that it makes 2005’s Make Believe feel like a soul-searching personal statement is difficult to understand. But ever since the band reformed around 2000 to make the Green Album, Cuomo’s has been increasingly fixated on writing clinically concise pop songs with little to zero depth.
Yet he’s an immensely talented songwriter, and if you picked up either of the Alone album (The Home Recordings of Rives Cuomo, some of which resurfaces in alternate forms on Ratitude’s deluxe edition), you were sporadically reminded why.
There are some catchy hooks on Ratitude, such as the chorus to I’m Your Daddy, though it’s disconcerting to find out Cuomo co-wrote it with Lukasz “Dr. Luke” Gottwald, the evil genius behind Miley Cyrus’s Party in the USA.
All-American Reject bros Tyson Ritter and Nick Wheeler pitched in to write Put Me Back Together, an ode to young love. If Cuomo was targeting teenage audiences he went to the right songwriting sources.
The Red Album’s democratic experiment where each Weezer member contributed to the songwriting – including awful lead vocals by Pat, Brian Bell and Scott Shriner – appears to be rightly finished, aside for Wilson’s one credit. The Red Album was atrocious for many reasons, but it did at least reaffirm the idea nobody but Cuomo should be leading this band. On Ratitude, the other three members are back in the shadows.
As much as I grouse about Weezer, and have been in increasing amounts since Maladroit, I’m not ready to write Cuomo off. Many great artists go through slumps, and like athletes eventually break out with greatness. Cuomo is just too talented to suck forever. He has an incalculable amount of music still in him. I just hope none of it resembles anything like Ratitude.[rssbreak]
