Writing a hit song is easy. Take it from Weezer front man Rivers Cuomo, who in 2016 explained his straightforward process to the podcast, unpacking a peppy new tune called “Summer Elaine and Drunk Dori.” I use the word straightforward sarcastically.So. First, consult your Spotify playlist of existing songs with cool chord progressions. Grab an electric guitar. Record yourself replaying that chord progression through a Maximum ’90s distortion pedal.

1. Review Of Weezer Black Album

Review Of Weezer Black Album

Put the title of the original song into an online anagram generator. Name your new audio file after one of those anagrams, so you forget about the original song and its lyrical associations but can find it again if you really need it for a podcast or something. Do vocal improvs over your new file.

(“You see all these walls are mirrored behind you, so I can do all these crazy poses and stuff,” Cuomo explained. “Get in the mood.”) Work out a chorus melody, because as (Oscar winner!) Lady Gaga says, if you don’t have a good chorus, you’re already screwed.Next, pick a song title from your giant spreadsheet of cool song titles. (“Summer Elaine and Drunk Dori” is a reference to a conversation Cuomo had with his daughter’s second-grade teacher.) For the lyrics, consult your other, much larger spreadsheet of cool lines for songs, culled from your daily stream-of-consciousness ” freewriting exercises and sorted by number of syllables, which syllable in each individual word is accented, etc. Sing the guitar solo before you play it to avoid the usual Guitar God bullshit. Consult, grudgingly, the rest of your band.

Superficially, these are elements that could be part of an album that showcases a darker Weezer, but the vibe of The Black Album is sunny and playful. Filled with bossa nova rhythms, glam stomps, and power pop, The Black Album moves swiftly and stylishly. Somewhere between the power-pop perfection of The Blue Album and the polished experiments of The Black Album, Weezer, perhaps the most innocuous rock band in the world, also became one of the internet’s most-hated. This continues to baffle me, not unlike much of the critical reception to this album so far. Weezer (The Black Album) was produced by TV On The Radio's Dave Sitek, with whom the band worked for the first time. The album's songs were entirely written on piano by frontman Rivers Cuomo for the first time in Weezer history, creating some of the most satisfyingly awesome songs in the entire hits-filled Weezer catalogue.

Cut the full song, including of you and your bandmates doing ad-libs and wolf whistles and whatnot, just to shake things up. Repeat this 10 to 12 times until you have an album. Pick a color. Name the album after that color. Put it out, and thereby enrage anywhere from 60 to 95 percent of your fan base.

Repeat until you run out of chord progressions, or spreadsheets, or, or fan base goodwill. “Summer Elaine and Drunk Dori,” on account of it being an original Weezer composition released in the last 15 years, is not a hit song. (It appears on 2016’s self-titled “White Album,” which also features songs called “L.A. Girlz,” “Thank God for Girls,” and “(Girl We Got a) Good Thing.”) But it is nonetheless a perfectly hooky and genial pop-punk jam whose lyrics somehow grow more, not less, profound when you understand the bonkers spreadsheet-based means by which they were Frankenstein’d together: “Good witch or bad witch / God is a woman / I wish I hadn’t played the prude / She touched my ankle / Paranoid android / I felt it in my molecules.”. By signing up, you agree to our and European users agree to the data transfer policy.The goal, as with nearly every song on every Weezer record since the first two, is to obfuscate Cuomo’s intent, and indeed his very humanity, entirely. “It sounds like something happened in my life, and then I observed it, and then I wrote a song about it, and it’s coherent—there’s a beginning, middle, and end,” he concluded.

“And that’s totally not the case at all. Each line is from a completely different place, and I just reassembled them in some order that suggests a story that never happened.” Big laugh. “It’s a crazy way to write.” And maybe the only way he can live. Omg I don't have a personality— Rivers Cuomo (@RiversCuomo)Being a rock star is hard. The conventional wisdom with Weezer is that at first contact, everyone despised the L.A. Alt-rock band’s second album, 1996’s raw and violent and brazenly problematic Pinkerton, so thoroughly that Cuomo couldn’t help but take it personally, and vowed never to make any of his work personal ever again. “Everybody hated it,” he in 2001.

“Critics, the majority of our fans, most of my friends and family, the other band members. Everyone thought it was an embarrassment. One of the worst albums of all time.” And soon Cuomo hated it, too: “It’s just a sick album, sick in a diseased sort of way,” he that same year, boasting that the band’s much-delayed third record, 2001’s self-titled Green Album, was “purely musical.

There’s no feeling, there’s no emotion.”The Green Album generated several peppy, abstract rock-radio hits, including and which you may know by heart even if you despise them. I confess that I, myself, still love them.

I have loved Weezer ever since I endeavored for weeks in high school to tape the band’s very first hit, 1994’s off the radio onto an actual cassette tape. And unfortunately, I loved Pinkerton, from its opening track called to its about a teenage fan to its most of all.

That album became, for both good and profound ill, a cult classic and, scabrous proof that the uglier the sentiment, the purer the artist. (“ Pinkerton’s great,” Cuomo, finally coming around himself. “It’s super-deep, brave, and authentic.”) But to love these fellas is perhaps to loathe, on a molecular level, yourself.

RelatedJust kidding: The band’s intent, as always, was to get attention. Same deal with, a surprise-release all-covers affair that leads off with “Africa” and also features ELO’s “Mr. Blue Sky” (adorably scruffy), A-Ha’s (surprisingly poignant), and TLC’s “No Scrubs” (world-historically terrible; shout-out ).

The Teal Album is pointless at best and at worst. Which makes it a fine preamble for the real new Weezer record, the self-titled Black Album, out Friday, which is hard to love but also harder to hate than you may imagine or prefer. As a collection of syllables, it suffices. As a conveyor of emotions, it will, impressively after all these years, confound you anew. We are dealing with either the best terrible band or the worst great band of their generation.

We will never be free of them, or they, apparently, from us.I have had the cornball mariachi hook to the Black Album’s lousy first single and leadoff track, “Can’t Knock the Hustle,” stuck in my head for much of the past 72 hours. “Hasta luego,” Cuomo sings on the hook. “Adios.” The video stars Pete Wentz as a rideshare driver; the presumably spreadsheet-based lyrics include such lines as “I’m an ugly motherfucker / But I work hella harder / And you can write a blog about it,” and “Leave a five-star review and I’ll leave you one, too” and “Don’t step to me, bitch.” (Late in 2018, Cuomo that he’d recently started swearing.) I’m not happy about any of this, and neither are you. Very little on this planet is worse than Bad Weezer. This applies to their colossally knuckleheaded 2005 song (all the worse for it being ) and their 2009 album called Raditude, and their subsequent 2010 album called Hurley that had, and the Teal Album in concept if not quite execution. (Though their cover of “Stand by Me” sucks, also.)What is all the more insidious, from a beleaguered fan’s perspective, is that they’ve spent the past decade or so showing just enough signs of life to prevent you from leaving them for dead. Maybe your lifeline is 2002’s “Keep Fishin’” (a.k.a.

), or 2008’s “Pork and Beans” (a.k.a. ), or 2014’s wherein Cuomo and Best Coast’s Bethany Cosentino lovingly sing the title to one another ad nauseam. (That one at least felt less like a total-spreadsheet deal.).

I am the most beautiful middle aged man— Rivers Cuomo (@RiversCuomo)The Black Album, at first blush, is reliably chaotic. There is an earnest song called “Zombie Bastards.” There is an even more earnest song called “Too Many Thoughts in My Head” that begins with the lines “Stay up reading Mary Poppins / Overwhelmed by Netflix options.” There is a draggy glam-rock song called “The Prince Who Wanted Everything” that sounds like post-extinction T. There is a gentle piano ballad called “High As a Kite” whose video is a disquietingly hostile parody of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Espaco rap 2 baixar. There is, climactically, a nauseous and vaguely swaggering tune called “California Snow” that reminds me of that Kanye West–Kid Cudi album; maybe I’m trolling, and maybe they are. You can write a blog about all of that, too. But there is also “Living in L.A.,” one of several songs that flirts with Tame Impala–style psych-pop and manages to stick in your head in less nefarious ways. The Black Album is produced by TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek, an art-rocker for the common man (and ) who gives even this record’s cruddier moments an eerie extraterrestrial sheen and endows the rest with an unexpected beauty (the “Living in L.A.” bridge especially) that sounds nearly human.

That song’s lyrics, too, come closest to transcending Cuomo’s convoluted songwriting process: “We’re fortune’s fools when we took the bait / We sacrifice our lives for rock ’n’ roll / Je ne sais pas, burning at the stake / We never really had a choice at all.” From to late-period Weezer’s best songs tend to concern the trials and tribulations of being late-period Weezer. How am I not a Wes Anderson character?— Rivers Cuomo (@RiversCuomo)I don’t hear emotions in Weezer’s music anymore; just the spreadsheets. That is by design. Cuomo is reluctant to approach even social media in a non-baffling way. In December, Saturday Night Live did a sketch where Matt Damon and Leslie Jones over the band at a dinner party; one of the biggest laugh lines, which doubles as the sketch’s writers could think of, is when Damon announces, “‘Pork and Beans’ is better than ‘Buddy Holly,’” one of the band’s earliest hits and least-guilty pleasures.

The line lands like a chair to the head. Weezer started selling immediately; Cuomo tweeted that he.But this, too, was misdirection: “I didn’t watch it,” he, though “I’m sure that would be my reaction if I did see it.” Snapchat aside, it turns out he uses social media for only a few hours on Fridays, and most of his tweets are thus auto-loaded at a three-a-day clip, and while “it’s 100 percent sincere and reflecting how I’m feeling at the time, probably only 20 percent of it is literally from me.

The rest is cut and paste.” Furthermore, “My new passion is computer programming. I’ve been writing a program to generate our set lists for.

I get almost sexually aroused looking at spreadsheets.” The desired effect is that his die-hard fans will continue to find his lust for automation hopelessly compelling and erotic. This is not how lust, or technology, or good music works. But ever since the world broke Cuomo’s heart, that is how Weezer works, in those fleeting but still-beguiling moments when the band works at all.

Image courtesy of Facebook.com/Weezeralbum: The Black Albumartist: Weezergenre: rock & rollrelease date: March 1, 2019star rating: five out of fivereview by Levi YagerThe Black Album may be the black sheep of Weezer’s color albums, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a great time. The new record is one of Weezer’s poppiest outings as a whole, without forsaking their rock roots. This dynamic carves out a unique place for The Black Album in the band’s discography that definitely showcases their musical versatility.“Can’t Knock the Hustle” gets the party started and quickly lays down a funky groove, complete with thumpin’ bass, a backing choir and some horns here and there. It’s a simple, lighthearted jam that primes the listener for additional enjoyable tunes to come.

That being said, this first track is also probably a good litmus test for your taste in the rest of The Black Album; if you don’t at all like “Can’t Knock the Hustle,” it might be hard for you to embrace the later tracks. Yet, I think if people check their expectations at the door and go into this album with an open mind, they’ll be happily surprised by what they hear – even if it takes a little getting used to for some listeners.“Zombie Bastards” is next on the record, and it’s just a dumb, fun song about killin’ those freaking zombie bastards. It’s ridiculous, and it works. Not to mention, it’s undeniably catchy. “Zombie Bastards” combines acoustic guitar with keys and electronic elements, which gives the song unique character.My all-time favorite song on The Black Album is number four, “Living In L.A.” It has an up-tempo, head-bobbin’ beat that carries the track, and its insanely infectious chorus takes center stage. “Living In L.A.” is one of those songs you actually wouldn’t mind hearing more than once in a day, and it’ll get you singing along after just one spin.There are a few mellower cuts as well, which flesh out the record nicely. Of these, I’d consider “Byzantine” the best.

Ninth on the album, “Byzantine” includes neat, little lead guitar flourishes and light percussion – in addition to some falsetto cooing in the vocals. It’s about being love-struck in a relationship that’s “only complicated if you want it to be.” The opening melodic hook of the chorus isn’t easily forgotten, and it’s overall a chill, whimsical track that has perfect placement in the album’s song ordering.One of the strongest qualities The Black Album boasts is that each song has its own individual feel; there’s not a dull moment to be found. Weezer also involves quite a bit of keys throughout the album, which are well-utilized, and there are more than a few sections with prominent synthesizers. Lyrically, it never gets too serious, but that serves the band’s general approach with this album pretty well.The hilarious, ultra-cool, last track is titled “California Snow.” It’s a big, fat, sparkly diamond of a finale that features “the definition of flow” and some Ric Flair-esque “woo’s.” “California Snow” is probably the most electronic cut on the album, and it includes a significant amount of piano, too.

At its core, it’s a track with a sick beat and a super-singable chorus that puts a memorable mark on the record.Clearly, The Black Album is dessert; it’s covered in a shiny, sugary glaze of pop-leaning production that goes down sticky-sweet. It’s a pleasure to experience, and it’s up to you however guilty a pleasure that is.

As for me, I have no shame indulging in the treats The Black Album has to offer. Weezer stays true to their identity as a band and simultaneously brings new, entertaining hits to the table. The Black Album might not be my top Weezer album ever – even among the color albums – but it’s definitely one I’ll be coming back to for seconds.