Ah 'Raditude'... What can I say? I kind of love this album but only because of how unbelievably bad it is. If 'Make Believe' is an unbearable Adam Sandler comedy, 'Raditude' is The Room by Tommy Wiseau. Hopefully you'll see what I mean by the end of the review. But anyway, backstory: It was November 2009, only a year and a few months after 'Red' was released and Weezer were already coming up with a new album. Short album cycles tend to go one way or the other, and Raditude went the other about as far as it could go. The album was panned, most critics giving it either a negative or mixed review. But how bad really is 'Raditude'?
It starts off OK, with '(If you're wondering if I want you to) I want you to', a storytelling exercise that suffers from stale instrumentation but is otherwise nice enough, especially for this album. Then things start getting bad. Every flaw with 'I'm your Daddy' is immediately obvious from the title (Bear in mind Cuomo was 39 when this was released.) and the creepiness is continued onto track 3, 'The girl got hot' a song about a girl getting hot, complete with 'wo-oh'ing backing vocals for maximum marketability.
The obvious attempt at getting as much airplay as possible is I think what irks so many people about 'Raditude', and this comes to a peak in what quite a few Weezer fans consider as the all time worst Weezer song, 'Can't stop Partying'. It's very easy to see why, it's the definition of selling out with completely artificial instrumentation and typical lyrics about 'Going to da club, getting girls and drinking till ya can't see straight no more', all of which is topped with a - and this really happened - Lil Wayne guest verse. WHY IS LIL WAYNE ON A WEEZER SONG?!
'Put me back Together' is a 'Make Believe'-esque faintly interesting slow song and 'Love is the answer' is a genuinely decent 'Within you Without you' cover Weezer-ed up a bit. 'Let it all Hang out' is a bro-friendly douchey song in the same vein as 'Can't stop Partying'. Then the album hits rock-bottom a second time with 'In the Mall', written by Patrick Wilson. With ingenious lyrics such as "First we smoke, then have a smoke". Once again loads of fans consider it Weezer's worst ever song and once again it's not hard to see why.
The album ends with the dull 'I don't want to let you go' (On Streaming websites it ends even worse with the strangely uncomfortable and sloppy 'Turn me Round'). So the album is terrible yes, and there's no way I could give it a positive review, but since Weezer seems to actually be good again, we can look back on Raditude as an intriguing and at some points hilariously bad vision of what Weezer could have been if they'd continued chasing pop success and piling on inappropriate co-writers (Only 2 songs on the album are written solo by Cuomo). Luckily, once you hit the bottom things can only get better - although that's little consolation to 'Raditude'
2/10
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