Extreme Listening Mode!

It happens to us all; ELM takes us on a personal trip to explain why one of his old favourites no longer do it for him.

I don’t want to come over all Sophia from the Golden Girls – there’s one for the kids – but picture it; 1995, the summer of Britpop. It seems guitar music is out of the ghetto again, anybody with a slightly floppy fringe and a reasonably decent record collection is getting signed and the whole world seems to hang on every word of Damon Albarn or Noel Gallagher. Gigs take on the aura of revivalist meetings, and many a teenage cold sore is swapped to 1977 by Ash. Sleeper appear to be interesting. These are heady times.

And yet….I’m feeling a little disconnected. In my late teenage years, I’d been banging on about this stuff for a while. Oh yes, I loved Oasis and Blur with the best of them, but had done for a long time previously – being one of the lonely few to really love Blur’s debut album and, being Roses-obsessed, having glommed onto the Gallaghers at their first arrival as a sort of Squire/Brown methadone. The music which is filling up the charts is, by and large, somewhat dull. This is not what we fought the indie wars for.

In this morass, everybody went absolutely bush for I Should Coco, the debut from Supergrass, an album I will go to my grave maintaining is shite. I was a man alone in his time, hamstrung by my terminal uniqueness, a condition I later discovered to be quite common in teenagers.

Something happened though – a friend slipped me a copy of a blue, self-titled album by a band called Weezer. It turned out, in its way, to be every bit as perfect as the Roses debut or Parklife. It sounded like the Cars after a particularly virulent bout of ECT. The lyrics were odd, beguiling things full of strange stories about twelve-sided die, 50s rock stars and sailors named Jonas. It was mental but it was unequivocally pop. And it really felt like a life-saver in late summer 1995.

Their next album came out late 1996 and was similarly marvelous. Pinkerton kicks off with the deranged ‘Tired of Sex’, which still sounds like someone chainsawing a Chicago song. It also had the wonderful ‘El Scorcho’ and the genuinely tender ‘Across the Sea’. That it didn’t quite match its predecessor is no slight. It’s a top album. Weezer then did what all sensible bands would do in this position; took five years off so frontman Rivers Cuomo could finish a degree. I loved them even more for that.

When they did come back, with 2001’s again self-titled but this time green album, it was pretty wonderful too. ‘Hash Pipe’, ‘Islands in the Sun’, ‘Photograph’? Oh yes. The quality of the non-single tracks was noticeably beginning to dip, but you’d still call it four-star. However, by 2002’s Maldroit, you wouldn’t. There were two good songs on it, singles ‘Dope Nose’ and ‘Keep Fishin’’. The rest was a foggy blur of churning riffs and shouty singalongs. There was little of the grace and mental dexterity which marked the earlier work. However, they’d earned the benefit of the doubt, and two things furthered my love for them. One was an outstanding show in March 2002 at the Glasgow Barrowlands which remains one of the best I have ever seen, an absolute tour de force of pop brilliance. The other was getting the Muppets to star in the video for ‘Keep Fishin’’ and clearly loving it.

But for me, I was on the downward side of my relationship with them. The warning sign was there with 2005’s Make Believe, which was preceded with a single which was only all right in ‘Beverley Hills’. The album was forgetful. The live show on that tour, despite being hideously expensive – a band of Weezer’s size and stature should not, under any circumstances, charge £30 for a show unless they plan to fellate you afterwards – was dull. Heads down, anodyne bashes at the old hits with no soul or verve. The question needed to be asked – if they couldn’t be bothered, why should I?

Make Believe was generally panned – Pitchfork in particular giving it one of those dispassionate kickings it seems to specialize in –and Weezer appeared to go for the tried-and-tested to arrest the decline. Producer du jour (for acts of a certain age) Rick Rubin was brought in for an album which was again self-titled but this time in a red cover. Yep, this one could run and run. And it was okay. Proceeded by the single ‘Pork and Beans’ – not the classic the hype would have you believe – it’s not as bad as Make Believe. That’s about it really. Cuomo’s songwriting increasingly sounded like a man whose muse had decided to take an extended duvet day.

And so they’re back, with an album called Raditude, a title so cloyingly unfunny and laced for men of their age as to make me want to weep with embarrassment. You can almost smell the forced irony, the desperation of the once cool who have no idea when it passed them by. And again, it’s all right. It won’t change your life.

So Weezer, very rich, with a decent legacy and little spark, will soldier on, but they left me back in the trench a while back. It was okay, I’d only slow them down. Weezer once meant a lot to me a long time ago, but whatever feelings I had for them simply dwindled and died. It was fun while it lasted, but you’ve got to follow your heart, and Rivers simply doesn’t know the way to mine any more.

Who have you sent the musical equivalent of a ‘Dear John’ to? Let us know below….