11 out of 11 people found this review helpful.
...Still Making Noise!!!
Date of Review: Mar 23, 2002
The Bottom Line: An album that finds it's place with simplicity, honest emotions, and a good sense of humor. Fun music that's not stupid like Britney Spears. Highly recommended.
For reasons I won't get into here, I had not listened to this album for quite a while, until a couple days ago. I decided to pull it out and give it a listen on my way to work a couple days ago. I knew that since it had been months since I last listened to it, it would be a welcome change from my usual listening routine. I didn't realize how true that would turn out to be.
This is a really fun album to listen to. What originally attracted me to this album were the references to Nightcrawler and Kitty Pryde of the X-Men, of which I was a die hard fan. As time went on and I became a more serious music fan I realized that the songs on this album are well crafted, but certainly don't sound overpolished. Rivers Cuomo sings with just the right blend of emotion and humor. It's easy to fall into the trap of taking yourself too seriously when you're playing rock music, and a lot of bands that I really like have fallen into it. Weezer however, has not. You can sense that the band honestly loves what they do, and are having a good time playing the music, even when they are singing about alcoholic fathers and the family business going under. Lots of bands act very dramatic when singing about such things, and that can actually dampen the effect, for me anyway.
My overall opinion about this album is that musically, I wouldn't call it a great album. The songs are still just simple rock/pop songs. However, they have a strange lasting appeal, that can't really be explained in musical terms. I think it's the emotion that is clearly in them, and the humor that lots of people can relate to. The truth is, I don't know what some of the songs are really about, but I can relate to emotion communicated through the music. That's what makes this one of my favorite albums. Even though, as I said, it's not a great, musically innovative album. It's just simple, fun music, that is actually sort of uplifting.
Highlights include:"Say It Ain't So", "Undone", "Surf Wax America", although there are no songs on the album that I routinely skip.
