Not many guitar heroes make it through their high school years without getting slapped with the dropout tag, so it's even more impressive that Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo gets to flaunt a bachelor's degree in English from Harvard University. A decade-long stint with the Ivy League's finest must afford one all kinds of vital knowledge, and yet Cuomo still can't wrap his horn-rimmed head around the law of diminishing returns.
Which brings us to "Weezer" - the band's third album in an endless saga of rainbow-spanning eponymous records. Following the masterfully quirky power pop of "Blue" and the obnoxiously quirky power pop of "Green," the band's newest self-titled LP, known as "The Red Album" because of its association with shame and embarrassment, revisits a gimmick that will only appeal to fans and toddlers learning their colors.
Opener "Troublemaker," with its crowd-pleasing, crunching guitar and rousing chorus combo is something of a misleading false start, as it is in fact, entirely listenable. From here, this collection nosedives a la Oceanic Flight 815.
"The Greatest Man That Ever Lived" laces Quaker reverence with a cappella rhyming and a healthy dose of police siren in hopes that the whole will trump the sum of its parts. The whole is a miscarried rock opera that makes Cuomo's mustachioed cowboy image on the record's cover seem positively respectable by comparison.
Following the admittedly catchy "Pork and Beans," "Heart Songs" features a ludicrous lyric that holds the dubious distinction of being the first to rhyme Debbie Gibson with Michael Jackson. It's hard to tell who wrote this one.
Moving on, "Everybody Get Dangerous" recalls The Breeders' "Cannonball" (notice the guitar effects in the chorus) but regrettably finds our frontman aping Anthony Kiedis' surfer dude rapping delivery in the verse. It sounds like a radio disappointment, but if "Beverly Hills" can get airplay, all bets are off.
The fact that Cuomo gets to subsist on this overplayed hobby he tries to pass off as a career might strike a future college graduate as unfair, but maybe now that he has a diploma, he'll finally do what the rest of us must: find a real job.
