Weezer (White Album)

All that really matters is that the White Album’s songs are great, and not just great for the 2016 version of Weezer. They stack up beside the band’s best work of the past 15 years.

The White Album manages to deliver on the promise showed by The Blue Album and Pinkerton without spending the entire time treading on familiar ground. Glowing with shades of the band’s past while differentiating its approach, The White Album sounds like a Weezer revitalized, reloaded, and ready to rock out like it’s ’94.

The White Album is, hands down, the best Weezer album since... well, since it became so hard to agree on what the last great Weezer album was.

It’s a gratifying experience structured like a pop album jam-packed with catchy choruses. While it is flawed and contains a few too many niche references, that’s become a part of Weezer’s DNA.

Weezer sound extremely happy in their own skin right now, and they're all the better for it. [Jun 2016, p.112]

It’s a fan-pleasing record that’s actually more Beach Boys than peak Beatles.

The boys are in peak form in (Girl We Got A) Good Thing, a sauntering piano-led number that has this bubbling, dumb-is-more-fun David Lee Roth attitude about it that could possibly cause one to shed a single, happy tear in its rousing finish. The colorfully romantic Wind in Our Sail is also typically gleeful, detailing a cute meet alongside one of the band’s most memorable choruses since Pork and Beans.

Life-changing? Perhaps not. Life-affirming, on the other hand? You betcha.

The White Album not only matches the sounds and feelings of Buzz Bin-era Weezer, but also the craft.

An instantly likable example of how good Weezer an be. [25 Mar 2016, p.50]

With The White Album, Weezer solidify their place as a more-than-capable modern pop-rock band.

Despite the occasional misstep, this is an enjoyable album, one that you can expect to hear blasting from car radios from now to September.

The album is strongest when drawing on cues that aren’t exactly new or original, but spitting them out through the filter that is very much Weezer.

While the band may never again reach the heights of their two ‘90s albums, The White Album is just as listenable as those second era albums.

Even when he's straining to purge any trace of emotion, the exuberant yearning of the music means it sneaks in anyway.

No, this isn’t Weezer at their world-altering best, but it is the sound of a band who have at least re-opened the door to the cupboard where their magic formula is kept.

For the most part, these ten tracks are a welcome throwback to the summery fun of The Blue Album and The Green Album.

Despite wavering towards the second half, there is no doubt that this is Weezer’s best album in years.

This is a focused record by Weezer standards, one that play to their strengths (sun-kissed tunefulness, nerdy introspection, loud guitars). [May 2016, p.82]

We listen to Weezer in 2016 largely for nostalgic dog whistles. We listen because Blue retreads like "Endless Summer" and "Summer Elaine and Drunk Dori" offer Proustian pleasures in spite of their obviously-recycled frameworks, and because the simpering, sweet "L.A. Girlz" is the group's best single since "Island in the Sun."

Although The White Album is predictable in that its singles are stand-outs, that just feels like another way that Weezer are doing a great job at sounding like Weezer.

The White Album is a return to a particular state, but it was never going to be a return to form.

This being late-era Weezer there are of course some erratic songwriting decisions--the dorky half-rhymes of Thank God For Girls--and a fair bit of filler (Jacked Up, (Girl We Got a) Good Thing are entirely unmemorable), but there’s also enough here to stir feelings of nostalgia in anyone who fell for the band the first time around.

Sadly, there's a few too many tunes like (Girl We Got A) Good Thing--the sort of throwaway preppy drivel critics of Weezer think they sound like all the time--for this to sit alongside the band's classic work. [May 2016, p.90]

The music ranges from Beach Boys baroque-pop to the awkward hip-hop flow of “Thank God for Girls” when not reiterating rote (if pleasant) Weezer crunch-pop anthems.

It’s OK, it’s not bad, but it’s largely standard Weezer and the stand-out tracks are fewer and further between.

Cuomo seems to have found his commercial home embracing a beach-party rock flavor for California kids who’ll “throw you a lifeline” and “show you the sunshine”, and indeed the beach tone persists through the album. This should be fine and modest, but in Weezer’s hands it’s just too overbearingly gross-sounding to let off that easy.