Back in the fall of 2019, I was driving somewhere and a song I didn’t recognize came on the radio. It seemed odd I wouldn’t recognize it, since it had a dated 80s hard rock guitar-driven pop melody sound that was very similar to a lot of the music I grew up with through junior high and high school. The song turned out to be “The End of the Game,” a newly-released song by Weezer. I don’t know how much I’ve ever considered myself a Weezer fan, even if I liked a number of their songs and had a couple of their albums in my music library. I wouldn’t go see them live if they were headlining their own show, but if they were touring as part of a package deal with some other bands, then yeah, they might be fun to see.
I liked this new song quite a bit. I was based around the kind of guitar hero histrionics I was drawn to growing up, but was all presented in a way where you couldn’t really tell if the band was going for that sound legitimately or in some kind of sarcastic hipster way, which is kind of Weezer’s wheelhouse for all of their music to start with.
It wasn’t long until I saw they had a new album on the way. They were calling it “Van Weezer,” which, when paired with the sound of the new song, seemed like a direct reference to Van Halen. Weezer trying to put together a Van Halen era album was intriguing, but the release date was far off in the future. This was still fall of 2019, and the album wasn’t scheduled for release until May of 2020. I thought, okay, kind of way into the future there, but it’s not like I’m eight years old and a new Weezer album is my equivalent of Christmas morning. Hopefully it will come out with a good “drive with the windows down” summertime sound and that will be that.
Then I remember getting to May of 2020, looking up the album again to see exactly what date it was coming out, and saw it had been pushed back to May of 2021. We were three months into the pandemic then so things like this happening were becoming too familiar, but it was still perplexing: Most music is either bought online, downloaded, or streamed, so they couldn’t be delaying it because stores were closing down. The only thing I could think of was their tour had been cancelled, and releasing a new album at least a year before they’d be able to support it on the road wasn’t optimal. I thought that was a stupid reason if I was right; after all, there are lots of musical acts that tour without new albums, and it made more sense to give the fans some new music while they waited for the tour. I’m not one of Weezer’s touring consultants though, so things happened as they did and I settled back to wait for another entire year. It was beginning to feel like this album would have to be the Holy Grail of 80s tribute rock performed by a 90s band struggling for relevance or it would be a sour disappointment.
Fast forward a year. The album came out yesterday.
First off, it’s no grail, holy or otherwise. It still absolutely sounds like Weezer, with the same awkwardly-constructed lyrics, vague Beach Boys quality of the backing harmonies, and the somewhat incongruous loud guitars. In a lot of ways, it sounds like an up and coming band tried hard to emulate Cheap Trick, and put together an album that wasn’t as consistent as the one the real Cheap Trick released themselves in April. It does have an old-school hard rock flavor that I appreciate, which will probably keep it in rotation a little longer than a typical Weezer album might have lasted, including one song that blatantly builds itself around the riff to Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” to the degree they could have just sampled it.
I guess in the end I expected more and hoped for and got a little less than I imagined. It’s an amusing album, but there aren’t many songs on it that stand out and announce themselves as potential favorites. I’ve even wondered a little if I would have liked it more had it been released on it’s original date a year ago. I guess if I was a Weezer megafan I probably would have liked it more. As a classic rock fan, I probably like it more than I may have otherwise. I suppose the biggest thing about it now is that as a music fan, at least my patience has finally been rewarded. I don’t have to speculate anymore what it will be like, and I can appreciate the things I like about it the most.
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