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80"Make Believe" is classic Weezer, further refining the template of unthreatening heavy metal riffs... welded to smart lyrics, largely of satirical nature, and infectious melody.
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It may be a spiritual cousin to Pinkerton, yet it's far removed from the raw, nervy immediacy of that album.... This has a lighter, brighter feel than any of its predecessors, not just in the music but in its outlook.
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80Hints that Cuomo may be approaching some sort of personal epiphany about his place in the world. [Jun 2005, p.116]
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A breakthrough for Weezer... Cuomo's songs are his most plaintive and brilliant since Pinkerton. [19 May 2005, p.74]
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Weezer's most conventional disc... a cleaner-sounding record heavy on way-earnest power ballads. [13 May 2005, p.85]
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67You can hear them struggling on Make Believe to keep fans bouncing along to the power-pop anthems but also keep it interesting for themselves so frontman Rivers Cuomo won't put the whole thing on hiatus again.
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64The thread that made Weezer everyone's favorite nerd-rock quartet--the soul and core behind the dramatic guitar crescendos--has unraveled completely, leaving us with a record full of, well, a lot of dramatic guitar crescendos. [#16, p.87]
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60Another patchily edifying addition to the Cuomo enigma. [Jul 2005, p.106]
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60In striving for Zen-like purity, the songs often end up eerily blank. [Jul 2005, p.122]
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60A chunk of almost straight-faced love/self-doubt songs show that while these geeks may not inherit the earth, they can play their competitors at their own game.
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Neither the best nor the worst album this band has recorded.
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It's the schizophrenic sound of a band starting over a decade later.
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60Some songs are worth a listen, but the overall package sounds and feels redundant and, putting myself at the mercy of =W= fans everywhere, renders itself irrelevant.
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Far from the unpredictable genius of old, it seems that Rivers Cuomo has returned lacking both edge and sparkle.
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The truth is that any Weezer copycat band could have made this record.
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Many of these songs are thin schematics for "perfect" pop songs. They're impressive in their commitment to formula--deploying catchy, whiny hooks, taut structure, loud-soft interplay, and well-timed guitar peals. Yet for all their nakedness, they offer little in the way of revelation.
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40The guitars still kick, but charm is thin on the ground. [Jul 2005, p.89]
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Make Believe might sound more sincere if the clean, precision-metal production didn't steamroll Cuomo's lyrical misery in bombastic arrangements featuring factory-issue power chords and a MOR-safe rhythm section.
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Make Believe seems so simple compared to [Weezer's] other albums.
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Weezer's once unique aesthetic has been replaced by something formulaic and ultimately too safe.
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It's a sweet, open, daringly earnest album in which the sad old Cuomo does battle with the wise old soul Cuomo wants to become. By conventional wisdom, it should never work as a rock album, and most of the time, that conventional wisdom is dead on.
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Infuriatingly plain. [16 May 2005]
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Make Believe finds Cuomo donkey-punching the formaldehyde-soaked corpse of his former glory.
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10You can feel how dreadful this record is from the very first bar.
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Sometimes an album is just awful. Make Believe is one of those albums.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 108 out of 186
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Mixed: 15 out of 186
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Negative: 63 out of 186
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BriJ.10
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RobbinL3
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5Not a terrible album but not a good one either. Average at best.