Album Review: Pacific Daydream- Weezer
1.5/10
Think of the least pleasant place/activity permutations life offers. Prison. Chinese water torture. Getting punched in the throat. The dentist. Getting punched in the throat by a decidedly Cultural Revolution-esque prison dentist. These are the associations that come to mind when listening to Weezer's newest album, Pacific Daydream. God only knows what compelled Rivers Cuomo to spawn this dumpster fire of an album and release it for public consumption, but I'm almost positive there is a statute in the Geneva convention that outlaws atrocities such as these. Let's see which facets of this album are competing for its worst.
An critical piece of information to keep in mind while listening to this album is that Rivers Cuomo is a nearly fifty year old, Harvard educated, grown ass human being. Let me repeat that. Rivers Cuomo is nearly fifty. Half a century. He has a degree in classical composition from Harvard University. I could end this review right now by telling you to listen to "Feels Like Summer" with that knowledge in mind. Let's not. Another vital nugget to recollect is the glory of Weezer's first two albums, Weezer and Pinkerton, both of which objectively qualify for pop's definition of masterwork. I'm not saying the Cuomo should have the skills or mindset that he had as a twenty something, but it's not like he was writing freeform jazz or anything back then. Weezer circa 1994 did not have a steep learning curve, and I'll leave it at that. Listening to the song "Beach Boys," and its painfully lame "music was just so much better back then" ethos makes Rivers sound like an irrelevant dinosaur, still wishing he could turn on the radio and hear The Beach Boys, instead of all that darned hippity hop. Between "Beach Boys" and "Feels Like Summer" I would have sworn that the real Rivers Cuomo had been kidnapped and replaced by every teenage girl who has heard "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and now totally wishes she was born in a different era.
These references lead into the first major problem of the album: the general lack of maturity present throughout. Pick literally any lyric from this album and it could serve my point. Nowhere to be found is the awkward beauty of Pinkerton, or the nerdy glory of Blue. The lyrics here are the same painfully insipid drivel that has polluted Weezer's work since Green. The never ending psuedo-clever references and painfully fake-awkward romance cliches make Pacific Daydream the lyrical equivalent of an Adam Sandler rom-com. Also present are the weird racial undertones that have always appeared in Cuomo's songwriting, still as mystifyingly unnecessary as the first time you heard "Goddamn you half-Japanese girls." There's nothing overtly racist here, but it's still just weird. Cuomo sounds like a fifty year old man writing from a sixteen year old girl's perspective, or like the dad who tries way to hard to seem cool in front of his son's friends and ends up just being cringeworthy.
This record is perhaps most offensive, albeit confusingly so, from a songwriting perspective. From the jump, it is immediately apparent that Cuomo still knows how to write a hook. That sounded like a compliment, so let me rephrase it. Most of the songs here feature some redeeming melody buried within the giant ball of feces that is the album's songwriting, production, and general direction. This being said, it is downright confusing as to why Cuomo chooses to back those melodies with songs that border on disgusting in terms of their influences and dynamics. The sickeningly out of place EDM trappings in many of these songs, particularly the singles, feel like the musical equivalent of scraping gum off the bottom of a desk and chewing it again. Nearly every song features some sort of miserably ineffective drop, big synthetic drums, or a fake attempt at festival style dynamics, all of which fall completely flat due to the album's horrendous production. In the end, what could have at least been a 6/10 album sheerly due to good hooks and acceptable songwriting has turned into a utter failure.
Speaking of production, we have yet another way in which this album offends all that is sacred in music. What genius thought it was a good idea for the album to sound like this? If you are going to put drops in your songs, for whatever convoluted reason, they better hit hard, or at least be a different volume and texture than the rest of the music. Everything on this album sounds shiny and sleek and perfected, almost to the point that it feels like a parody of EDM's perfectionist production. No instruments stand out, or even attempt to play a part that would have been remarkable in better sonic circumstances. Instruments just meld into a flashy, sugary blur whilst they play the simplest, safest progressions they can. Not only is this album's production in no way supportive of the album's aesthetic, is is actually detrimental to its quality. The album is considerably worse off with the polish it was given, rather than if if was given a little rougher mix and a little less compression.
To put it shortly, this is an embarrassing moment for a band with Weezer's pedigree. Weezer has two seminal albums, countless hits, millions of fans, and a household reputation yet Rivers Cuomo continues to release trash like this It by no means has to be this way; last year's Weezer album was probably their third best ever. Cuomo knows how to write solid power pop songs, and he knows that he knows that and he probably knows that we know that he knows that. Yet, something inside him tells him to keep making poor stylistic judgments under the guise that he is simply being himself, or that maybe we are all wrong and he alone knows what true artistry is. Well guess what Rivers? You already got away with one of your albums being reevaluated in hindsight. It is not going to happen again. This is not Pinkerton 2. Pacific Daydream sucks, and that is how history will stay.
