Weezer (Black Album)
Weezer is not the first major artist in pop history to call a project The Black Album, but theirs is the first to \[double-checks notes\] immediately follow a Teal Album and include a song about parasailing. So don’t let the foreboding name fool you: This doesn’t lean into metal or goth sensibilities any more than The Green Album was about envy. Produced by TV on the Radio\'s Dave Sitek, the band\'s decidedly poppy 13th album (and sixth monochromatic and self-titled) runs the sonic gamut from acoustic to bombastic. “The big idea for The Black Album was to write all the songs on the piano, so I think that gives it some of that classic songwriter-y feel,” Rivers Cuomo told Beats 1\'s Zane Lowe. “I would go up to Sitek\'s house and just hang out with him. I\'m so bored of myself; I\'m just like a totally regular person, and I\'ve written about myself so much. So it was fun to just look into his world and think about how he sees things and put that into this character on The Black Album.” Even a potentially ominous line like “Let\'s do hard drugs/Fix our problems” feels innocuous couched in the breezy confines of “Piece of Cake.” As Weezer lean into their recent viral fame—thanks to their “Africa” cover and a quickly ubiquitous *SNL* sketch debating their career trajectory—the mission is to make even the trickiest ideas go down easy.
Weezer reflects on their own capricious history, using a blunt force the likes of which they’ve never deployed before.
“Don’t get mad at me, I’m just being honest,” Rivers Cuomo sings on Weezer’s latest self-titled, color-coded album, this one a Metallica/JAY-Z/Spinal Tap shade of black. (It’s the band’s sixth such foray including the near-simultaneously released covers-only Teal Album, and its 12th studio album of originals overall.)…
The LA band have made a wilfully goofy album whose jokes wear pretty thin, pretty fast – though this is a largely solid alt-pop record.
The band's 13th album portends a musical change-up, but its core is still precise, poker-faced pop-rock
Rivers Cuomo rumbled about recording The Black Album back in 2016, when he was in the thick of promoting The White Album -- a record designed to modernize the adolescent angst at the heart of Weezer's earliest music. Cuomo gamely pursued this concept with Jake Sinclair, a producer weaned on '90s Weezer, but once The White Album hit the stores, he seemed more interested in creating its counterpart, a record that abandons the light for dark, where the vocalist sings profanities on record for the first time. It was a high concept for a band so devoted to high concepts it couldn't resist recording two other conceptual records -- Pacific Daydream, a 2017 LP which was another salute to the West Coast, and a surprise covers album called The Teal Album -- before unleashing The Black Album in March 2019.
After being teased nearly three years ago, before the middling Pacific Daydream and the head-scratching covers compilation, what Weezer have...
Having recently dropped their Teal covers album, Weezer are back, but this time with their own material.
When Rivers Cuomo's Californian crew rode the post-grunge wave to glory on their debut Blue Album and heart-worn classic follow-up Pinkerton in 1994 and 1996 respectively, we never could have imagined just how saddening and crushingly disappointing Weezer
On the back of the fan requested viral cover of Toto’s ‘Africa’ comes ‘The Black Album’ from the band who fashioned some of
To say the Weezer brand has tarnished in the quarter century since the band's major label debut first requires acknowledging that Weezer is a brand.