Dear God, why?<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not against covers albums. Bands sometimes do them when they\u2019re stalling until the next album, or needing to just play songs they love. Think of Renegades, The Spaghetti Incident, <\/i>that one Smithereens album where they played the Beatles B-sides, etc.<\/p>\n
Except: how many people list those albums as their favorites by the band in question? None, because they often amount to karaoke efforts. The occasional cover track is awesome, but a full album of covers is rarely necessary. <\/p>\n
In this case, Weezer\u2019s fourth self-titled album (and the first that doesn\u2019t deserve that honor, since it\u2019s not Weezer songs) <\/i>is basically an extended gimmick. The cover of Toto\u2019s \u201cAfrica\u201d is legendary by now, an Internet prank that the band took seriously and a resulting song that was not only a massive (and baffling) hit but one that reintroduced the band to a new audience and to old fans who had forgotten about them. <\/p>\n
So Rivers, evidently, decided to strike while the memes were hot and record a full album of covers, half of them \u201880s pop songs, the rest showing at least some creativity. The opening brace of tracks is mind-numbing; you can hear \u201cAfrica,\u201d \u201cEverybody Wants To Rule The World,\u201d \u201cTake On Me,\u201d and \u201cSweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)\u201d in any dentist\u2019s office or \u201clite rock\u201d station any day of the week. You don\u2019t need to pay money for faithful recreations that sound exactly like middle-aged white guys attempting to \u201crock out\u201d after two Coors Lites on a Friday night at Applebee\u2019s. <\/p>\n
The second side\/half is marginally more interesting, in the same way that reading a shampoo bottle while you\u2019re taking a dump is more interesting than reading the conditioner bottle because you forgot your phone. \u201cParanoid\u201d is a fun romp through a Black Sabbath standard, but neither \u201cHappy Together\u201d nor \u201cMr. Blue Sky\u201d say anything you need to hear, though the attention to detail (across the whole album, really) is solid.<\/p>\n
A stiff start to \u201cBillie Jean\u201d turns into a decent cover with a little more power chords than Jackson\u2019s original, though nobody will ever prefer this version, of course. More odd is the faithful, straight, and very white cover of TLC\u2019s \u201cNo Scrubs,\u201d played absolutely down the middle like it\u2019s the most normal thing for Weezer to cover TLC. Right. And Donald Trump will be president someday! <\/p>\n
Had this album come out without all the run-up to \u201cAfrica,\u201d it probably wouldn\u2019t be seen as a cash-in, but the whole enterprise just smells so strongly of a publicity stunt designed to gin up interest for the band\u2019s next project (the Black Album<\/i>, coming this spring, in case you\u2019re thinking of something to mail to your ex and can\u2019t find any anthrax). <\/p>\n
Of course, Rivers Cuomo is not who he was in 1996, nor are any of us, so maybe it\u2019s not fair to expect him to write Pinkerton <\/i>over and over. But there\u2019s a line between artistic integrity and blatant fan service\/commercialization, and the Teal Album crosses it about five times. To their credit, Rivers and the band reproduce the songs with uncanny ability and the aforementioned detail. It\u2019s not easy to do.<\/p>\n
But, why?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":33732,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[5738],"rating":[5619],"class_list":["post-45553","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-weezer","rating-rating-c"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/45553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/45"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/45553\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45553"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=45553"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=45553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}