4 keepers (original album)
keeper avg .400
After the mostly sleepy Make Believe the catchy, solid "The Good Life"-like riff opening "Troublemaker"**** is a welcome sign of catchy, solid tracks to come. Its opposite follows; "The Greatest Man That Ever Lived" progresses through no less than ten different musical variations of increasing grandiosity, roughly corresponding to lyrics vainglorious enough to make Kanye West blush. The opening quartet of songs about the music business continues through the goofy "Pork And Beans" (there's at least one of every album) and the more sincere "Heart Songs," an endearing sentiment undone by dull melodies. Similarly flawed, "Everybody Get Dangerous" is an amusing rager about the hands-off parents of Gen-X presumably in contrast to the overprotected children today, undone by an amateurish bridge about "guardian angles" and "destiny." The band stated that this album features more contributions by band members other than Rivers Cuomo than previous Weezer albums, and features the first two songs exclusively by other members; Brian Bell's "Thought I Knew"**** is typical but catchy Fastball-type 90's pop-rock, drummer Patrick Wilson's electronically-augmented "Automatic"**** actually resembles former member Matt Sharp's The Rentals, while bassist Scott Shriner gets a co-writing credit on Cuomo's creepy, condescending "Cold Dark World." The relatively varied album ends with the most 90's midwest college emo (Rainer Maria, Promise Ring) song the band has created, a nearly 7-minute super-bombastic opus "The Angel and the One"****, featuring memorably interplaying guitar parts. Though easily Weezer's most interesting album aside from Pinkerton it's too bad nearly ever other song is assertively rotten, ruining the flow of a potentially good album.
All of the official "Deluxe Edition" bonus tracks are awful for one reason or another. Some versions include bonus track "Life's What You Make It"****, a interesting cover of English band Talk Talk, also sung by Patrick Wilson. An insultingly uninspired version of The Band's "The Weight" was also released on international versions.
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