Kenosha Wisconsin's own...Weezer!!

Started by cron, March 12, 2005, 06:22:47 PM

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deathnotronic

Rivers used to be in a hair metal band before Weezer. I can probably lay my hands on a few demos, if anyone wants to hear it.

I don't really dig "Beverly Hills." I guess I expected it to be more rock than over-produced guitar tones. But the solo is pretty cool.

I've also heard Rivers hates Pinkerton the the Nth power.

UncleJoey

Quote from: deathnotronicI've also heard Rivers hates Pinkerton the the Nth power.

That's pretty much common knowledge.

Nice avatar, by the way.


Also, if anyone cares, the video for Beverly Hills is available for streaming on the media page of weezer.com. It's about as boring as the song.
Well, I've got news for you pal, you ain't leadin' but two things: Jack and shit . . . and Jack just left town.

deathnotronic

Thanks. I wasn't sure if I was correct so I made it a rumor-esque statement.

modage

the new album has leaked if anyone still listens to them...

http://regnyouth.blogspot.com/

Quote from: MacGuffin"We didn't ever set out and say, 'Let's do a mixture of Pinkerton and the Blue Album with some Maladroit guitar solos,' " says guitarist Brian Bell. "But I think it sounds like that, because that's what we are."
it doesnt sound anything like that.  its not good.  the lyrics are especially terrible.  just the most cliche rhyming things.  this has no more 'feeling' than a limp bizkit song.  what the hell happened to them?  it still might be better than the last album, but i dont know.  they're both bad.
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

UncleJoey

Quote from: themodernage02what the hell happened to them?

1. Rivers Cuomo has no passion for music anymore.
2. Rivers Cuomo is batshit crazy.
3. Everyone in the band hates Rivers Cuomo.

I'm not saying anything nobody already knows, but that's basically the problem. The new Rolling Stone article tries to be positive, but there's a lot of troubling stuff in there. I'm still going to keep an open mind about the new album until I hear it, though. I don't think Maladroit is a bad album. It's not great or groundbreaking in any way, but I enjoy listening to it once in awhile.
Well, I've got news for you pal, you ain't leadin' but two things: Jack and shit . . . and Jack just left town.

meatball

Rivers passion for music was an extension of his sex drive. I'm a firm believer in that. Now that he's enjoyed a decade of primo groupie ass, he's jaded.

I saw Matt Sharp perform in Silverlake a while back, and it was so sad seeing the man play in a tiny little room while Rivers continues to hold onto a loyal fanbase. Including the tons of high school girls who think he's adorable.

I stopped listening to Weezer after Maladroit, which was... I don't even know what it was. Weezer helped me through some angst filled high school days. But, now I only see Rivers as exploiting his geeky appearance when he's really just a horndog.

UncleJoey

It's funny you say that, because according to his interview with Rolling Stone, Rivers hasn't had sex in two years. So perhaps you're right (except about him being a horndog - he has now replaced that with "future cult member").
Well, I've got news for you pal, you ain't leadin' but two things: Jack and shit . . . and Jack just left town.

ᾦɐļᵲʊʂ

It's funny that Rivers doesn't like Pinkerton... when it was basically their best album (following Blue, of course).

Weezer has this problem with releasing 5 shitty songs per every great song, and nothing in between.
"As a matter of fact I only work with the feeling of something magical, something seemingly significant. And to keep it magical I don't want to know the story involved, I just want the hypnotic effect of it somehow seeming significant without knowing why." - Len Lye

MacGuffin



Weezer's Weird World
Rivers Cuomo hasn't had sex in two years, and boy, is he ready to rock. By VANESSA GRIGORIADIS

A couple of days ago, Rivers Cuomo was helping his parents out with an epic spring cleaning at their house in suburban Connecticut -- "I was the motivational coach," he says. "My role was to ask, 'Do you really need this third can of hair spray?' " -- when it was decided that it would be better not to do the European promotional tour for Weezer's new album, Make Believe, the band's first record in three years. That meant two weeks free before they started rehearsals for the Make Believe tour. That meant Cuomo could do some more vipassana, a strict style of meditation developed by the Buddha and passed down by Burmese monks.

"There was nothing else for me to do," explains Cuomo.

Nothing is exactly what one does on a vipassana retreat: ten days of twelve hours of silent meditation beginning at 4 a.m., with small breaks for food but none for conversing. Most people wouldn't enjoy this, but Cuomo, 34, is not most people. Life to him seems to be a gigantic behavorial experiment, a large part of why Weezer have put out only five albums in thirteen years, despite their Prince-like vault of hundreds of songs. Cuomo had been to ten retreats in less than two years -- following precepts like sleeping on the floor and fasting after noon -- and he was ready for another. In fact, he completed one in northern Massachusetts a couple of weeks ago. That one was twenty days long, and he spent it in a closet. "It was great!" he says.

So instead of asking the band to head to the East Coast for the Rolling Stone photo shoot and interview before leaving for Europe, Cuomo decided to fly to California for a retreat in Yosemite, and if it was possible to accommodate the magazine in Los Angeles, great, but if not, he wasn't missing his retreat. "How many people would love to be on the cover, and then you've got Rivers saying, 'I can only do it on this one day, and if you can't fit it in, it won't work'?" says Weezer guitarist Brian Bell, 36. "On one hand, I'm like, 'Jesus, how could you do that to us? We've worked hard for twelve years and we finally make the cover, and you screw it up with one sentence.' Then there's another part of me that's like, 'That guy has balls!' Even if it is really selfish."

These are the kinds of things that happen, though, when you're living the moment, which is Cuomo's new mantra -- untethered from miserable thoughts about the past and future and free at last from the greedy ego, Cuomo is currently in communion with his deep, true self. This self needs to be free, and, accordingly, Cuomo has been careful not to make any pacts about future Weezer recordings; he has also only agreed to support this album until the end of this year. "We were going to call this record Either Way I'm Fine," says drummer Pat Wilson, 36. " 'Cause Rivers kept saying that when we had to decide about things." Serenity is important to Cuomo. The shoot at the Playboy Mansion for the video for their first single, "Beverly Hills," posed a threat. "There were 150 fans around, and when we played we heard that sound, that deafening sound that you get onstage," says Wilson. "I could see Dude telling himself, 'Hold on, hold on, don't get too excited!' "

Dude, as in the chill stoner hero played by Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski, is the band nickname for Cuomo, though Cuomo and the Dude could not be more different. Cuomo is not chill. He has budgeted one hour for our initial interview, and when we sit down at a cocktail table in the plum-colored foyer of a Hollywood recording studio, he pushes the alarm on his tan-and-black digital watch. It is eighty-five degrees out, and he is wearing a sweater and has set a black parka on the couch. "I don't really notice where I am," he says. "I don't differentiate all that much. I don't look around much." Talking to Cuomo is like talking to a newscaster. He's altogether pleasant but stiff as a board. No emotion registers on his face, at least not until he hears something that interests him, at which point he curls his lips into something resembling a smile, widens his brown eyes from saucers to soup bowls and exclaims, "Wow!" "Great!" or "Holy cow!" The most interesting topic, of course, is meditation.

"At first I was vehemently opposed," says Cuomo. Rick Rubin, who produced Make Believe in off-and-on sessions that lasted more than a year, suggested meditation. "I sent him a very anxious page, saying, 'Rick, no. I cannot get into meditation because it will rob me of the angst that's necessary to being an artist.' And he said, 'OK, don't worry about it, forget it.' I think because he put no pressure on me, I began to get intrigued. Then I did a Tibetan-Buddhist meditation retreat. That wasn't intense enough for me. I knew I wanted something extreme."

Says Rubin, "I'm often associated, or in some cases blamed, for Rivers' meditation practice. It's worked for him -- you might see him smile or laugh now, and before you would never see that. I never suggested the particular style of meditation he's doing. Whatever Rivers is interested in, he dives in a thousand percent. He takes thing to radical extremes."

Radical extremes are what Cuomo has made his life from, and in the context of his history, the Either Way I'm Fine era isn't all that outrageous. It even makes some sense given his childhood, which was spent on ashrams -- first at the Zen Center in upstate New York and, after his father left the family when he was five (he eventually settled in Germany for a while as a suffragan bishop in a Pentecostal church), at "Woodstock guru" Swami Satchidananda's Yogaville commune in Connecticut. Everyone was a vegetarian, and no one raised his voice or cursed. Cuomo didn't like it much. He declared himself a metalhead at eleven and started playing Kiss covers with the neighborhood kids. "I was only interested in Slayer and Metallica then," says Cuomo. "I still love that music, but now I have so much appreciation for what my parents' generation did for opening up our country to Eastern philosophy and raising me like that. I feel so lucky."

Some of Cuomo's phases make a little less sense, though. Like when he followed the blockbuster success of Weezer's first album, Weezer, also known as the Blue Album, which went platinum in 1995, by getting his right leg broken: The leg was forty-four millimeters shorter than his left, and in order to make them equal, a metal cage was affixed to his right thigh; every day he'd tighten some screws on it to pull the leg a little longer. Or when, shortly thereafter, he shelved rock stardom to pursue an undergraduate degree at Harvard, studying there from 1995 to 1997, when Weezer's second album, Pinkerton, was released (he resumed his studies last fall and now has one semester left). When that record proved less critically and commercially successful than the Blue Album, Cuomo went back into his shell. Living in a Culver City apartment building under a Los Angeles freeway, he put fiberglass insulation over the windows and hung black sheets over the insulation. Then he painted all the walls black, disconnected his phone and spent a lot of time with his pet gecko.

Punishing himself has always seemed like a good bet to Cuomo, and you only have to look at his perpetually hunched shoulders and balled-up palms to realize that the assignations he keeps with himself are brutal. He gets off on deprivation. Cuomo doesn't own a car, even though he lives mostly in L.A. ("I don't have a parking space," he says, by way of explanation). He rarely listens to music. But one song he cued up recently was Kiss' "Goin' Blind": "Little lady, can't you see/You're so young and so much different than I/I'm ninety-three, you're sixteen/ Can't you see I'm goin' blind?"

"I'm so moved by those lyrics," says Cuomo. "I can't believe they came up with that."

As far as his lyrics are concerned, Cuomo has long protested that Weezer's songs are not funny or ironic or anything other than a reflection of his own anguished state. Most of the songs on the current album are about things that happened to him. "Pardon Me" was written after he attended a meditation course in which the teacher told him to repeat over in his mind "I seek pardon from all those who have harmed me in action, speech or thought." "Freak Me Out" is about a spider, says Bell. "Beverly Hills" is about, well, how Cuomo feels about Beverly Hills. "I could live in Beverly Hills, sure," he says, meaning he could afford it easily. "But I couldn't belong there."

(Excerpted from RS 973, May 5, 2005)
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

meatball

Quote from: UncleJoeyIt's funny you say that, because according to his interview with Rolling Stone, Rivers hasn't had sex in two years. So perhaps you're right (except about him being a horndog - he has now replaced that with "future cult member").

Don't believe River's publicity. I know things. There are things that I know. Well, actually... the things I know did happen approx. two years ago. So maybe that's believable. But he's still a horndog.

The little shared secret about not having sex in two years is like a red flag to potential backstage beauties -- Rivers Cuomo is taking numbers.

UncleJoey

Quote from: Meatball
Quote from: UncleJoeyIt's funny you say that, because according to his interview with Rolling Stone, Rivers hasn't had sex in two years. So perhaps you're right (except about him being a horndog - he has now replaced that with "future cult member").

I know things. There are things that I know.

OK, but how many Dave's do you know?
Well, I've got news for you pal, you ain't leadin' but two things: Jack and shit . . . and Jack just left town.

modage

Pitchfork Review, so true...

Weezer
Make Believe
[Interscope; 2005]
Rating: 0.4


If you're one of those poor souls who wile away the day job by keeping a scorecard of music review sites, there's one thing you already know: There are two distinct groups of bad albums. The more prevalent kind is the fodder that fills a critic's mailbox, bands with awkward names and laser-printed cover art that don't inspire ire so much as pity. The second group is more treacherous: Bands that yield high expectations due to past achievements, yet, for one reason or another, wipe out like "The Wide World of Sports"' agony-of-defeat skier.

Often, these albums are bombarded with website tomatoes for reasons you can't necessarily hear through speakers: the band changes their sound and image to court a new crossover audience, perhaps, or attempts a mid-career shift into ill-advised territory. Or maybe they start writing songs about Moses in hip-hop slang. But sometimes the bad album in question is none of the above; it doesn't offend anyone's delicate scene-politics sensibilities or try to rewrite a once-successful formula in unfortunate ways. Sometimes an album is just awful. Make Believe is one of those albums.

Weezer have been given a lot of breaks in their second era-- both The Green Album and Maladroit were cut miles of slack despite consisting of little more than slightly above-average power-pop. The obvious reason for this lenience has to do with the mean age of rock critics, and the fact that most of these mid-20s scribes were at their absolute peak for bias-forming melodrama when The Blue Album and Pinkerton were released. Even for someone like me, who came late to the Weezer appreciation club, it was impossible to hear these "comeback" albums without the echoes of the earlier alt-rock pillars ringing in our ears.

But now there's an antidote to that nostalgic interference. Right from the start of Make Believe, when Weezer lurches into a flaccid take on Joan Jett's "I Love Rock N' Roll" with an unfathomably horrible speak/sing vocal from Rivers Cuomo (think "I like girls who wear Abercrombie & Fitch"), you can hear hundreds of critics mouthing "no no no" and going into crumpled shock. What's more disconcerting is that the song gets worse over the course of its three minutes (let's just say "Framptonesque voicebox solo" and get back to repressing the memory)-- and it's the album's first single.

Hearing a song like "We Are All on Drugs", which nicks the classic melody of the schoolyard "Diarrhea" song (you know, "when you're sliding into first..." and so on) for an anti-drug message stiffer than Nancy Reagan's "Diff'rent Strokes" cameo, it calls into question whether The Blue Album was really that great, or whether it just stood out as a rare beacon of guitar pop in a grunge-obsessed era. Trying to wrap your mind around the land-cliché-record lyrics of songs like "My Best Friend" and "Haunt You Every Day" leads me to wonder how Pinkerton could ever have seemed like such a cathartically resonant treatise on unrequited love. Was Rivers Cuomo always on the notebook-scrawl level of "I don't feel the joy/ I don't feel the pain," and did we not notice because scrawling in notebooks was the depth of our emotional knowledge at the time?

Okay, let's not be so hard on ourselves here: I'm pretty sure this is all Rivers' fault. Pinkerton triumphed by being an uncomfortably honest self-portrait of Cuomo. On Make Believe, his personality has vanished beneath layers of self-imposed universality, writing non-specific power ballads like he apprenticed with Diane Warren, and whoah-oh-ohing a whole lot in lieu of coming up with coherent or interesting thoughts. Coupled with his continued obsession with tired power chords and bland riff-rock (surprisingly not sonically boosted by producer Rick Rubin, whose post-"99 Problems" grip on relevance is now officially spent), the creative driving force behind the Weez is asleep at the wheel.

Considering Weezer supposedly went through hundreds of songs and several discarded albums to arrive at this final product, the laziness of this songwriting borders on the offensive. Whether recycling dynamics from the band's back catalog (see: "Perfect Situation") or taking the easy Mother Goose rhyme (see: every fucking song here), these 12 tracks sound as if they were dashed off in an afternoon's work, maybe with Rubin holding the band at gunpoint. The one half-decent song on the record, "This Is Such a Pity", fails to even maintain its status as a pleasant Cars homage, interjecting a guitar solo that sounds like it was cut from the original score to Top Gun.

So does Make Believe completely ruin not just present-day Weezer, but retroactively, any enjoyment to be had from their earlier work? I don't know-- I'm too scared to re-listen to those first two albums-- but it certainly appears that Make Believe will expertly extract the last remaining good graces the critical community has to offer latter-day Weezer, unless my colleagues' memories of slow-dancing with Ashley to "Say It Ain't So" are more powerful than I can possibly imagine. Of course, if Ashley went on to break your heart, fellow critic, Make Believe might be just the medicine you need; put it on repeat and watch your emotional scar be obliterated as collateral damage in the torpedoing of Weezer's legacy.

-Rob Mitchum, May 9, 2005
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

modage

JimmyGator, tell us why Weezer sucks now.  dont be afraid of detail.
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

cron

they'll be playing over here in november and i kinda want to go . is their show any good?
context, context, context.

Pas

I hear it's trash and River has no soul left inside the shell that is his frail body.