Van Weezer

With tons of great hooks, and minimal cringe, this is the rare Weezer record that is simply fun to listen to, without fear of having to jump for the “skip” button every couple of songs.

For the first time in too long, it is a Weezer record that rocks exactly how a Weezer record should.

A sweet and heartfelt love letter to his own adolescence, mining a long-gone era of poodle hair and shiny Spandex for inspiration. ... Aficionados will have fun spotting the references, but there's emotional heft beneath the screaming solos. [Jul 2020, p.112]

Van Weezer is a Lightweight guilty pleasure, but mostly delicious pleasure. [Summer 2021, p.80]

The whole thing mostly works, though, thanks to the generous application of a Blue Album power-pop filter. I Need Some of That channels The Cars (like much of Weezer’s finest work) and is the clear standout here, but there’s plenty more to raise a smile.

It’s an imperfect album that still manages to shine with catchy singles and gratifying deep cuts, even if never quite reaches the height of its predecessor, ‘OK Human’.

For the most part, this is just the same old Weezer with added two-hand tapping. That's a good thing, since the half-hearted metal schtick is mostly just an excuse for frontman Rivers Cuomo and his bandmates to crank their amps and play the power pop they do best. It's a less radical experiment than this year's all-acoustic, orchestra-assisted OK Human.

Most of these [80s metal] sonic and lyrical allusions immediately give way to the kind of crisp, automatically catchy power-pop you’d hear on any Weezer album. ... Unsurprisingly, it’s the bright, smiling, spandex-y pop side of metal he loves, not the macho misanthrope side — there’s a reason the record is called Van Weezer, not Weezer Bloody Weezer.

The sentiments charm and Cuomo's nose for a tune endures, but the drive-time metal supremacy of Def Leppard and Mutt Lange is never under serious threat. [Jun 2021, p.84]

At its best (the crunching ‘Hero’ boasts one of Weezer’s greatest ever choruses), ‘Van Weezer’ marries soft metal and melodic geek culture to stupendous, festival-slaying effect. At its most frustrating (‘All The Good Ones’), it makes otherwise marvellous Cuomo songs sound like boy band rock pastiche. And at its absolute worst (‘1 More Hit’, ‘Blue Dream’ – most of the album’s second half, basically) the tokenistic thunder-chord segments, motorbike noises and Iron Maiden riffs distract from great songs.

Van Weezer’s two-handed tapping revels in its hamminess. And for all its pyrotechnic guitars and arena stomp, Van Weezer never actually roars all that hard.

Although Weezer’s shared love of (and debt) to the Sabbaths and Van Halens of the world is undeniable, their homages to those bands feel as scattershot as they are heartfelt.

It is an album that would make Tenacious D roll their eyes and make metal fans scratch their heads.

Van Weezer is in part saved to some degree by virtue of the fact Cuomo does still have a fine ear for a melody and an ability to craft whopping great choruses. The problem is he’s been ploughing the same musical furrow with increasingly diminishing returns for the best part of the last decade.

Does it succeed on its own terms? In the case of Van Weezer, the answer isn't clear. It's too patchy to be a Yes but far too tuneful and breezy to be a No.

We’re left with a contrast that never quite works. Instead, it’s where the concept is applied metaphorically that ‘Van Weezer’ finds some green shoots.

Van Weezer continues that trajectory with its hard-rock/metal ethos, but it seldom feels like anything beyond a novelty.

A gimmicky novelty album that has a handful of redeeming songs but will ultimately fade into the ether within a few months.