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Ultimately, it's Weezer's deft mixing of immediately hummable rock with lyrics that reveal Cuomo's own melancholy gaze on the pop landscape that makes Raditude a passionate surrender to growing up and a throw-your-arms-up-and-scream ride down the other side of the mid-life roller coaster.
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Raditude still feels like the product of Rivers Cuomo, who's no less unnerved by girls than he was before his 15 years of rock stardom.
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80Instead of trying to divine the line between earnest and ironic, Weezer fans should just sit back and enjoy what works here. And like every Weezer record, plenty does.
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His willingness to make fun of his psychosexual damage only makes it more poignant.
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Raditude sounds like a high-stakes game of chicken, and the intellectual gamesmanship becomes more satisfying than the music.
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Given what we know about Cuomo’s eccentric inner world, it’s hard not to find those dazzlingly perfect melodies kind of hollow.
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60Weezer's likeabe, insubstantial powerpop has often been infused with somewhat tetchy intimations of latent intellectual heft. On Raditude, this manifests in guest appearances by Amrita Sen and Nishat Khan on the dreadful "Love Is The Answer." Elsewhere, though, Weeaee seem to have ceased to care. [Feb 2010, p.107]
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60The tunes come think and fast, but their geeky adolescent routine is wearing thin. [Jan 2010, p. 126]
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60Old-school Weezer fans won't like it, and neither will blog-rock acolytes. But that's the point. Raditude is the murderous revenge of the middlebrow.
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Raditude seems intent on establishing itself as a now album, sacrificing any sort of cohesive vibe for a pop-friendly disc designed for car stereos to be turned to 11.
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60Overall, this one's largely forgettable, and plays primarily as a jokey--if not well produced--one-off continuation of The Red Album.
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Sonically, the lean disc is more in line with Weezer’s recent work and the overall mood is playful--with plenty of lyrical references to a radder era.
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Hooks only go so far, and outside of 'Put Me Back Together' and 'I Don’t Want To Let You Go,' Cuomo doesn’t appear interested in propping them up with human emotions.
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The weird aftertaste of Raditude isn't that Cuomo has so surrendered the oddball charm of his band's first two albums, though. It's that his late-career pursuit of mindless, opulent fun is so transparent that it almost taps a deeper vein of interior sadness than anything on "Pinkerton."
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43Raditude doesn't have that stench of minimal calculation on it; if anything, it's as earnest as the famously confessional Pinkerton, just written by someone whose age doesn't match his POV.
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40Weezer disappoints again. The rest of the tracks are, for the most part, more throwaway power-pop in the vein of the "Red Album."
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40Whatever the case, Ratitude is both a clunker and a fitting end to a decade in which Weezer continuously spiralled downward.
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40The dressing is a little different this time around; a few more jokes, a couple catchy tunes (this is most definitely not the worst Weezer album ever), but once again Weezer are content with churning out sugary pop tunes that go down easy and unimpressively.
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Raditude is an album of surface appeal--there’s no heart beating inside these plasticized tunes.
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30Driving yet jaunty guitars abound and backing chants fill the required spaces, yet it all comes across too much like a sub-par parody of their former selves.
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In general, the choruses are forgettable, the guitars are woefully exaggerated, and the quirkiness that made Weezer a band to be cherished now seems forced and stale.
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Raditude is not a great album or even an interesting one.
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Raditude is thoroughly extraneous. It is Weezer’s worst album.
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Raditude is just the latest and fullest articulation of Cuomo's wincingly sad desire to become a mainstream success, [Holiday, 2009, p.79]
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Raditude is a thematically vacant and sonically uninspired collection of ditties tailor-made for mainstream radio; it consistently fringes on unlistenable.