Pacific Daydream

Permission to sprinkle Big Sounds over their insta-recognisable songwriting might not have been something they’d allow themselves in the past, but here it transforms what could’ve easily been ‘churning out more of the same’ into 21st Century alt-pop bangers.

Pacific Daydream is all carefree, expertly crafted pop, free of irony and all the better for it. Lock the doors, crack open a cold one, and enjoy an endless summer with Weezer.

Pacific Daydream is both exuberant and plaintive; it’s full of songs about past joys and present loneliness, recalling friends and lovers who are no longer part of the singer’s life. ... But there’s a whole pop apparatus around him--a tambourine shaking, a firm beat, happy backup voices--to insist that Weezer’s kind of music is far from extinct.

Pacific Daydream can be read as a bitter reaction to the Trump era and geo-political chaos, or maybe it's just a set of (mostly) great tunes that provide light relief from it all. [Nov 2017, p.114]

Beneath its glossy surface, there's not only plenty of melody, but a perverse sense of humor that keeps the record from sounding too smooth and settled.

As a collective work, Pacific Daydream is ultimately a step below the resurgent greatness of the White Album, but it still soundly ranks in the upper tier of Weezer’s new-millennium output. It’s peppered with some of the band’s best songs in recent memory.

Pacific Daydream is pretty much just fine--34 minutes of unambiguous, catchy music, competent enough to land on the good side of Weezer's discography without reaching for anything more.

The album works extraordinarily well together, but the tracks wouldn’t work as, say, singular pulls for a personal mix. You can take or leave the album. It’s good enough. But the songs don’t stay with you.