Although no one in the band originally hails from Southern California, Weezer have got the sound and attitude of early-'60s Los Angeles down. Melodies bounce with vigor; in the lyrics, help is just a sunshiny day away. There is still plenty of Weezer's signature dorkiness on Pinkerton, the follow-up to their successful 1994 debut, Weezer. Guitars veer off key; tempos speed up for no apparent reason. But what you get is true to the sun-'n'-fun aesthetic of great jangly pop.
As a songwriter, the band's singer and guitarist, Rivers Cuomo, takes a juvenile tack on personal relationships. Throughout Pinkerton, he pines for all the girls he can't have, the girls he can
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have but shouldn't, the girls who are no good for him and the girls about whom he just isn't sure. "Across the Sea," which begins with a deliberately corny piano intro, is the tale of an 18-year-old girl from Japan who has captured Cuomo's heart by letter. "They don't make stationery like this where I'm from," sings Cuomo wistfully. In "Pink Triangle," Cuomo humorously describes desperately trying to wed a young woman who is a lesbian: "If everyone's a little queer/Why can't she be a little straight?"
Weezer over-rely on catchy tunes to heal all of Cuomo's wounds. In "El Scorcho," the song's infectious chorus proves to be slim reward. "Tired of Sex," a look at a brooding stud's empty sex life, is as aimless as the subject's nightly routine. But "Butterfly" is a real treat, a gentle acoustic number that recalls the vintage, heartbreaking beauty of Big Star. Cuomo's voice cracks as he unintentionally bludgeons the fragile creature in the lyric, suggesting that underneath the geekyteenager pose is an artist well on his way to maturity. (RS 746)
ROB O'CONNOR
A good young rock band often ends up writing its bad second album in the back of a tour bus. Rivers Cuomo went to unusual lengths to avoid that cliche: Before recording Weezer's second album, in 1996, he enrolled at Harvard, had surgery to lengthen his right leg by two inches and then walked around the campus feeling utterly isolated and wishing that some of the students wearing Weezer T-shirts would recognize him.
Cuomo poured all his self-loathing and loneliness into ten autobiographical songs on Pinkerton, detailing his awkward love life with agonizing specificity, beginning with "Tired of Sex," where the groupie grind has never sounded less appealing. Some real-life girls mentioned on Pinkerton are ones Cuomo had crushes on but didn't date: a lesbian, a girl in one of his classes who rebuffed his invitation to a Green Day concert and an eighteen-year-old in Japan who wrote him a fan letter and with whom he became obsessed, wondering if she thought about him when she masturbated. With all those true confessions, it's no wonder that Cuomo is somewhat embarrassed by Pinkerton now -- and that the record became a cornerstone of the late-Nineties emo movement.
The self-produced album sounds as raw as Cuomo's lyrics, without any of the sheen that Ric Ocasek provided on the band's debut. But what makes Pinkerton more than a blog entry is Cuomo's unfailing gift for power pop. "Across the Sea" -- which quoted so much of that Japanese fan's letter that Cuomo gave her a slice of the songwriting money -- is the masterpiece, building to ever-greater intensity as Cuomo wails about the most distant of all his unattainable girls. At the end, the chorus swells: "I've got your letter/You've got my song." Unrealized fantasy is enough happiness for anyone, Cuomo is saying -- and he sings it with enough passion to make you believe it too.
