Death to False Metal

*Death to False Metal* is a collection of unreleased songs from the band’s fifteen-year career on a major label. How songs as catchy as “Turning Up the Radio,” “I Don’t Want Your Loving” and “Blowin’ My Stack” ever landed on the cutting room floor is a question worth asking. This is hardly an album of inferior outtakes, but more like a lost album coming to light. “Losing My Mind” is a campfire tune where the singer’s life is going down the drain. “Everyone” cranks it up towards the metal end of the spectrum, while “I’m a Robot” bops along with a sprightly and aggressive Ben Folds Five-type bounce and lyrics that once again trend darker than the day. “Trampoline” features the Weezer wall of guitar and some great harmonies. “Odd Couple” and “Autopilot” crunch with new-wave guitar drives and more lyrics that find Rivers Cuomo going off the deep end. Diane Warren’s “Unbreak My Heart” (a hit for Toni Braxton) is given the Weezer once-over and turned into another punk-pop hit.

On paper, it sounded promising: A month and a half after Weezer’s latest full-length (and first for Epitaph), Hurley, the band delivered Death To False Metal, a collection of rare songs recorded by modern-day Weezer. In other words: old songs by a new band, put out shortly after the new album, but on the same day as…

Released as an accompaniment to the deluxe reissue of Pinkerton, 2010’s Death to False Metal is not quite a new album, and not quite a rarities retrospective, either.

Weezer's new new album Death to False Metal arrives less than two months after their last new album, Hurley.