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.

The lyrics are often stupid as hell. ... What's novel about Pacific Daydream is that its giant, overcompressed choruses really do burrow their way into your skull. [No. 148, p.51]

Pacific Daydreams certainly doesn’t achieve the grandiose aims from the aforementioned inspiring proverb. That said, thankfully it is still a solid record which should satisfy fans.

The quality control flags badly later on; the wearyingly anodyne La Mancha Screwjob and Get Right, in particular, are buffed to the brink of featurelessness.

Butch Walker's post-postmodern production sometimes overwhelms the songs, but its best moments--"Weekend Woman" could be Weezer's "Good Vibrations" with is everything-but-the-sink hooks and a catchy, Lady Gaga–like bridge--gamely make up for the places where Pacific Daydream sounds like Weezer by Numbers.

This is Weezer experimenting a little, while still remaining recognisably them. For those down for this sort of thing, stick on your dancing shoes and go with Pacific Daydream's flow. [21 Oct 2017, p.50]

His oddball pop-culture references and fondness for clichés can be charming amid wailing electric guitars, but taking center stage, they too often fall flat.

At the end of it, this record is a mixed bag. Fans of Weezer’s poppier side will find plenty to like. Whereas fans of Weezer’s more well regarded records will wish they chose another producer.

Much of the album’s electro-lite flavoring does provide some hummable moments, but as the cringingly tricked out Mexican Fender and stomping chants of La Mancha Screwjob suggest, they’re most likely to suffer a slow and gradual death at your local Forever 21.

If you can let Pacific Daydream completely envelope you; throw you to the beach that instigated the album, then you’ll find sheer happiness here. If, however, you go in with any expectations of than that, you might find things a bit more difficult.

It’s disappointing, then, that this impulse of creative energy has resulted in a record that feels flat and strained.

Pacific Daydream, in spite of its name, mostly just gives you a feeling of being nowhere.

The Weezer frontman continues to tap that increasingly dry well, his dusty lovelorn longings for perfect summer nights now sounding completely formulaic.

With at least half of these songs, there is almost nothing to say, nothing to be baffled by, nothing to argue about, and for that sad, whimpering reason, Pacific Daydream can probably be called Weezer’s worst album.