Weezer - Pinkerton

Sun 8th Oct, 2006 in Music Reviews

Weezer’s second album Pinkerton is influenced by all the wrong bands, operates in an emotional monotone and is relentlessly narcissistic. It’s also a near perfect record. It was initially overlooked by fans and greeted with little enthusiasm from the music press, a rude wake-up call for the group after the commercial success of their first record, the hook-filled self-titled affair known by fans as the Blue album. But admiration for Pinkerton has since swelled to the point that it now casts a shadow over both the band’s back catalogue and the entire wave of confessional rock it helped kickstart.

It opens with the thumping Tired of Sex, in which bespectacled singer/songwriter Rivers Cuomo reels off his sexual encounters in a colourless, just-woke-up drawl: ‘Monday night, I’m making Jen / Tuesday night, I’m making Lynn’ before the songs explodes into a guitar solo which makes it arguably the best air guitar track this side of The Manic Street Preacher’s ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’. All this before Rivers warms to the task, his vocals becoming an impassioned screech as he delivers the neat lyrical twist which casts the song’s bravado in an altogether different light: ‘Oh why can’t I be making love come true ?’

Further adventures in self-wallowing and romantic neurosis ensue; on Pink Triangle, the narrator falls for a lesbian and wonders ‘Everyone’s a little queer/Why can’t she be a little straight?’, on El Scorcho, it’s the ‘half-Japanese girls’ that do it to him every time and on Across the Sea its a fully Japanese girl who writes a fan letter and fires the lonely Rivers’ over-active imagination: ‘I wonder how you decorate your room/I wonder how you touch yourself’. The honesty of the lyrics is bracing throughout, often confessional to the point where listening seems a vaguely voyeuristic exercise, like leafing through a college roommate’s journal. On Why Bother? they reach a pinnacle of frustration, Cuomo’s voice dripping with knowing cynicism as he sings ‘Maybe we could even get together/Maybe you could break my heart next summer’.

Very loosely based on the musical Madame Butterfly, Pinkerton sees the group gleefully lift riffs from the type of unfashionable 80s stadium metal behemoths most indie bands shy away from; tellingly in a previous song Cuomo sang of the Kiss posters on his garage wall. It is a record that revels in its own dysfunction and takes delight in its geek-rock heritage. There is an exuberance about Pinkerton that provides a counterpoint to the lyrics of romantic failure, sexual frustration and self-doubt. Think of the palpable excitement in El Scorcho when Cuomo yelps “How cool is that!?” to the girl not having heard of Greenday, the dogged optimism and cathartic buildup to the chorus in The Good Life.

The band’s record since Pinkerton is a patchy one, a long absence from record shelves eventually ending with some great singles (the perfect pop yearning of Island in the Sun) and others that were some distance from great (‘We are all on drugs’ anyone?). At the height of Weezer’s early popularity, Cuomo once confessed he couldn’t quite understand the band’s widespead appeal, admitting “We’ve sold all these albums when, honestly speaking, we’re a super straight-ahead American guitar garage rock band”. Maybe so, but for one neurotic, messy, inspired moment, they were the greatest garage band in the world and no-one even came close.