Weezer

After writing about the landmark "Blue Album", I promised myself, again and again, that I'd write the full monograph on Weezer. But you know what? They don't deserve it. Too many records, too many of them bad.

I'm sure Rivers Cuomo would understand. He'd be pissed off, but he'd understand.

Still, a few of the fifteen albums that followed their immortal 1994 debut deserve to be talked about: the none-too-prophetic "Everything Will Be Alright In The End" from 2014, the White Album two years later, and, why not, the acoustic swan song "OK Human" from a few years back. But above all "Pinkerton", my Weezer album, before I developed the right sense of irony to feel close to its illustrious predecessor too. Because "Pinkerton", whether you consider it slightly less great or every bit as great as its predecessor, is in every respect a step backward. A retreat.

Stylistic significance and production grandeur aside, 1994's "Weezer" was a massive success. Singles etched into history, crystalline melodies, eternal hooks, videos (courtesy of the genius Spike Jonze) in heavy rotation on MTV, destined to become part of the collective imagination, and so on. Less than two years after forming, that miraculous record yanked the four scruffy Californians off the frat-house risers and shot them straight into the pantheon of American alternative rock. Back when alternative rock actually made money, no less. After all, with those sun-drenched yet thunderous riffs and those hook-laden choruses sung in that slightly goofy voice - a sort of self-mocking antidote to the earnest dramatic instincts of grunge - things could hardly have turned out any other way.

Thinking about it, such overwhelming success was hardly the right headspace for four Los Angeles students with questionable taste in clothes and a background steeped in college rock. "Pinkerton" is therefore not a surprise, but an almost natural reaction to what had happened. A retreat into the past. Into battered rehearsal spaces, vomit-stained carpets, the wet dreams of an angry post-adolescence. A failure foretold. A record inevitably destined to be disowned. Blazing and powerful, furious and incontinent. Necessarily a one-off - as everything that came after would go on to prove, starting with the green album.

The four goofballs poking out of the blue of "Weezer"'s cover had given way to a winter landscape populated by sad figures trudging through the snow (it's a print by Hiroshige, an artist of the Japanese Ukiyo-e school - the same school as Hokusai, to be clear); the guitars had grown far rougher, and the infectious cheer had made room for a graceless irony and psychotic fits of rage. Clearly, a move like that could hardly fail to disorient a world that was still whistling "Buddy Holly" in the shower.

Despite the record's lukewarm critical and commercial reception on release, time would prove "Pinkerton" right, and it would soon come to be regarded as a masterpiece on a par with its predecessor. A cult would grow around it, and emo bands like Jimmy Eat World would hold it up as a touchstone.

Obviously Cuomo wouldn't have agreed. To him, "Pinkerton" is an embarrassment. In an interview with Rolling Stone, he pretty much described it as a drunken bender you regret the morning after. And indeed, bassist Matt Sharp, identified as the main driving force behind the project, left the band shortly after the promotional tour, and the band itself would avoid the album's songs like the plague.

And I get it, Rivers, at least a little. I used to say "Pinkerton" was my Weezer album, and yes, I'm a bit ashamed of it. Of those days as a middle-class student playing at nihilism and doom-and-gloom, flaunting alternative culture and underground listening habits during unlikely dj-sets interspersed with readings from Bret Easton Ellis, Marcel Proust and John Fante. We called ourselves Durden, and my partner in crime — whom I won't name, to avoid getting kicked out of the group like Sharp, or worse, out of the friendship, which luckily doesn't exist anymore as a duo. The high point of our show was precisely the song that opens "Pinkerton", "Tired Of Sex". My accomplice would mix it while I stripped down, revealing the title written in lipstick across my scrawny, hairy chest.

So, once again, I get Rivers. And Rivers gets me. We're no longer those arrogant, idiotic students — at least until we decide to empty a bottle of Talisker down our throats — and it's only right to remember it all with a mix of compassion and shame.

But let's get to the music: this is a genuine peak of the noisiest '90s, where the decade's taste for raw, live-sounding production meets overwhelming melodies. In the schizophrenic manner of Pixies and Pavement, but with a far more blatant radio-friendly streak than those illustrious inspirations.

It opens with a song as brilliant as it is simple, the aforementioned "Tired Of Sex". A rasping bass that thrashes about like a bull in a china shop and a cheap, blaring little keyboard drive a shouted, often off-kilter vocal line lamenting too much sex during college days. Literally: "⟦Q1⟧". The sad truth, though, lies in the following line: "⟦Q2⟧".

This opens up a whole world, that of "Pinkerton", made of dashed illusions and broken hearts. In short: the world of the passage into adulthood. Where party-loving instincts start clashing with the young adult's drive toward greater emotional stability. Where sleepless nights spent drinking and despairing over things not worth it start to feel like too many, weighing down like boulders.

This delicate limbo is expressed through Sharp's charging guitars, a frantic four-on-the-floor drumbeat, and above all Rivers Cuomo's raw, yelping delivery. Thirty-four minutes for ten tracks of gritty, devastating power pop. The singalongs pile up — you could point to one per track without any trouble. Even more numerous than them are only the women, some named, some not, who pour gasoline on the fire of Rivers's nervous breakdown.

With this album more than any other, it would be pointless to dissect the songs and point out the must-listens: "Pinkerton" is a hard, pure punk rock record, its songs aren't marked by particular evolutions or theatrical flourishes. No, its greatness lies in its simplicity, its immediacy, its overwhelming urgency. In the fact that everyone is free to belt out at the top of their lungs whichever chorus feels closest to them, the one that seems to have sprung straight from their own guts, from one of those nights back in college.

Just like the opening track, the album's closer, the aching "Butterfly", also stands apart from the rest of the record. It's a faint acoustic guitar-and-voice ballad, where Cuomo — never before so meek and repentant — offers his apologies to the targets of his furious outbursts and, head bowed, finally moves toward accepting responsibility.

In between: breakneck guitars and hiccuping vocals ("Getchoo"), mocking nods to the melodic roundness of the Blue Album ("No Other One"), musical-lyrical dadaism ("El Scorcho"), thunderous basslines and assorted hysterical screams ("Why Bother?"), and other sharp, theatrical, sarcastic little atrocities. And, needless to say, moving ones.

As proof of how much perception of "Pinkerton" has shifted over time, one need only cite Rolling Stone. On its release, the American music magazine called it "worst record of the year", slapping it with zero stars in a scathing review. Only to completely change its mind in 2002, the year it placed the album sixteenth on its list of the greatest records of all time. Schizophrenic reactions to a schizophrenic record. The one person who will never change his mind is Cuomo — just as I will be forever ashamed of what I used to do with "Tired Of Sex".

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03/03/2026