Weezer

Van Weezer

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Genre: Alternative Rock, Indie Rock.
Released: 07/05/2021
Via Crush Music

Album Review: Weezer – Van Weezer

Alt-rockers Weezer is back with a unique album, to say the least. ‘Van Weezer’ has been advertised as the band’s homage to metal and promises to be full of heavy riffs mixed in with the classic Weezer format. I’ve been keeping my eye on this since it was announced so without any further delay, here are my thoughts on Weezer’s ‘Van Weezer’.

The album opens with ‘Hero’. I have to admit that the album starts fairly weak. I couldn’t get into this track no matter how hard I tried and felt that it came across as extremely generic and uninspired which left me fairly surprised to find out that this track is a single… Yikes! The album continues its fairly uninspired style with the track ‘All The Good Ones’. The sentiment behind the song is pretty cool but in execution, Weezer miss the mark and the sheer amount of repetition borderlines annoying. Not a hot start from the band.

Thankfully, ‘The End of the Game’ gets the album rocking. A clean intro matched with a more entertaining progression is exactly what is needed from this record. I think it’s clear to see why this track was picked as the first single for the record as it incorporates a familiar style to what you’d expect from Weezer and mixes it with the more experimental style they are going for in this album. The album continues its momentum with ‘I Need Some of That’. A more simplistic entry to the album that has a nice aura of charm around it. The song doesn’t try anything too out of the ordinary and that works pretty well for a band like Weezer.

‘Beginning of the End’ is an odd one for me. There are parts I like and parts I don’t. The band try to create contrast with a heavier style but I don’t think it works well for them. If I had one piece of advice, it would be “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it”. I was also not a fan of the track ‘Blue Dream’. I found the way they used the iconic riffs from Crazy Train to be very cliche and the whole song just feels like a really poor attempt of sampling the Ozzy Osbourne classic.

A slight improvement comes in the form of ‘1 More Hit’. I think this is the best track that incorporates the heavier undertones however I’m still not sold on them. I feel that Rivers vocal style doesn’t fit this style of music and it leads to a lot of the tracks being quite hard to listen to. ‘Sheila Can Do It’ has a really solid riff to it and that’s pretty much it. The song drones on continuously and feels extremely dull and bland. Safe to say I won’t be adding this one to a playlist anytime soon.

‘She Needs Me’ is the penultimate track and to no one’s surprise at this point, The song is a letdown. The sensitive style of writing we have come to expect from Weezer just doesn’t work well with this kind of music as it creates such a contrasting clash of styles that just doesn’t work together. So what other way would you end an album like this? Another disappointing song of course! ‘Precious Metal Girl’ is an acoustic number that breaks the flow of the entire album. The lyrics are cheesy and quite cringy at times.

I went into this album full of optimism and unfortunately, I’ve come out of it extremely disappointed. I think this may be one of Weezer’s worst albums to date. Nothing is memorable enough to me to even recommend a single track. What a shame!