Weezer - Green album review

In 2001 Weezer emerged out of a 5-year hiatus with a new album that showed them coming back from the brink of breaking up. By mid-2000 relations between the band members had dissolved, and previous bassist Matt Sharp left the group, to be replaced by Mikey Welsh. Luckily, in August of the same year Weezer was invited to play at a festival in Japan (Somewhere I'm sure Cuomo would be pretty excited to play at if  'Pinkerton' is anything to go by.) and the members started considering a new album - which eventually became 'Weezer', or 'The Green album'.

If it isn't obvious enough from the cover, Weezer had decided to return to their original 'Blue album' sound - at least compared to the heaviness of 'Pinkerton'. This disappointed many fans at the time of release, but in retrospect 'Green' is still a good album. It's full of very very straightforward pop tunes which are for the most part cute and fun. Heck, the albums only half an hour, mainly because every song is very short.

'My name and Jonas' and 'Tired of Sex' are indicative of the following album's sound and the same can be said of 'Don't let go', Track 1 of 'Green'. It's really catchy, has upbeat drumming, simple melody, Cuomo singing mainly in his mid-range, root note picking bass and warbling guitar. This is pretty much the same as 'Photograph', 'Knock down drag-out', 'Simple pages', ''Glorious day' and my favourite out of the bunch 'Smile'.

The more interesting songs on the disc are those that do something a bit different. 'Hash pipe' has edgy guitar work, falsetto verses and far more interesting lyrics than most of the album. This can also be largely said of 'Crab', the coolest sounding tune here. The lyrics of most of the songs are the biggest problem I have with 'Green', with most of them being vague and quite generic (If you want it you can have it/ But you've gotta learn to reach out there and grab it.), as if 'Holiday' was taken as inspiration for a whole album. The song structures are also very repetitive for the most part, with verse, Chorus, verse, Chorus, Guitar solo, Chorus repeated for nearly every song.

To sum up 'Green', it's a lot like biggest hit 'Island in the sun' - It's nice, catchy, sounds like Weezer and most people generally like it, but it's not especially amazing and it's definitely nowhere near the album it was trying to emulate.
7/10