Weezer

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Weezer’s 20th—and seventh color-coded self-titled—album opens with anxious rumination on <b>“Say Yes”</b>: “Everybody here’s gonna try and drag me down/Make me so scared that I’m never gonna wanna leave this town,” vocalist and head Weez Rivers Cuomo laments over shimmering guitar chords. But as he gathers his resolve, the music gains steam, eventually exploding into the crunchy chords and syrupy vocal harmonies that marked early Weezer favorites like “Buddy Holly” and “Say It Ain’t So.” The band has been around for decades, so there’s also some metarumination: “Cranking out another ’90s jam...they just want the classics,” Cuomo grouses on <b>“C.E.O.,”</b> his voice surrounded by dissonant guitar chords and party babble à la the band’s breakthrough single “Undone (The Sweater Song).” The restless Cuomo grapples with the ways his “thinking like a mad professor” has been “getting me nowhere,” with a juicy guitar solo doubling as a chance to please any execs within earshot. A spark of renewed collaborative energy flows out of songs like <b>“Shine Again,”</b> an alternate-universe anthem written by drummer Patrick Wilson with guitar heroics that match its lyrics’ resolve. <b>“Nowhere,”</b> another Wilson composition, veers between a charmingly awkward stab at a power ballad and rants about fauna-wrecking gentrification set to a speaker-blowing waltz. The countrygaze band Wednesday drops in for <b>“We Might as Well Be Strangers,”</b> where Cuomo and vocalist Karly Hartzman lament a withering relationship—although they can still come together for its punchy chorus. Weezer’s best moments come when its members dig into their collective chops and flip the fundamental concept of pop on its head, and the gold album is full of them. “You can’t fake the real thing/This is it,” Cuomo bellows near the end of the triumphant <b>“The LA Sound,”</b> a fine epilogue for an album marked by reinvigoration.

via Apple Music