I just pressed play, and somehow I’m already sad.

I don’t specifically remember the first time I listened to this record, but I remember the general sense of happiness that listening to it brought me at the time. I remember following along with the Xeroxed lyrics sheet that you had to send away for. I remember bonding with friends over this record. And now all I can think of is the fact that at some point in this re-evaluation of Weezer’s catalog, I’m going to have to listen to Make Believe. Ugh.

I’ll mop that puke when I come to it, though. For now, I’m safe in the halcyon days of my =w= fever, Weezer (The Blue Album). I think you can guess how this review will turn out (spoiler alert: I like this record a lot), but nevertheless, let’s get started.

I’ll be going track by track, since this would otherwise just be a formless nostalgia session.

1. My Name Is Jonas

Acoustic guitar, tambourine and then a wall of distortion. This song is a perfect overture to Weezer’s Symphony No. 1. It sets the stage for the record and the band itself by combining hard and soft, dark and light, while never wading too deep into either mode. The acoustic finger-plucking never turns to sap and the heavy riffs never devolve into schlock. By the time the harmonica shows up, the song has become an anthem, but something about that harmonica, and the bookend of the acoustic outro, keeps it from going full arena-rock.

Lyrically, I have no idea what’s going on, and I never have. But the meaning doesn’t matter. The words sound cool when you put them together, and you walk away with a vague sense of rebellion and solidarity with construction workers.

A strong opener.

2. No One Else

Okay, this song is fucked up and I even knew it back then, when I was 14. If you need a reminder of the lyrics, here are a few examples, paired with an approximation of my reaction upon hearing them for the first time:

“My girl’s got a big mouth with which she blabbers a lot/She laughs at most anything, whether it’s funny or not”

Heh. That’s kind of a Beach Boys-esque, I guess….

“And if you see her, tell her it’s over now”

That’s just silly. 

“I want a girl who will laugh for no one else”

Uh.

“When I’m away she puts her makeup on the shelf”

Okaaay….

“When I’m away she never leaves the house”

Dude. 

The real problem with this song, though, is that it’s so goddam head-bobbingly catchy that you can’t help but forget how creepy it is. It’s an insecure douchebag theme song that you hope was written ironically because you can’t help but sing along. I’d love to believe that Rivers wrote the lyrics as commentary on mistreatment of women, but I dunno man. I just don’t know.

Anyway, great song. I honestly love it. That lead-up to the guitar solo is perfect. The bass line is perfect. Most parts of this song are perfect. Ignore the words.

3. The World Has Turned And Left Me Here

The acoustic/electric dichotomy returns. This time it brings a melancholy, dare I say emo, quality to the music (I wonder if Rivers will run with that on, say, the next record?). Matt Sharp is singing falsetto harmony. There are two guitar solos.

I love this song, but honestly it’s always been the low point of the record for me. The production is solid. The call-and-response thing is pretty catchy. But otherwise, it’s kind of boring. Not a lot going on here.

Still a good song.

4. Buddy Holly

The opening lines are inexplicable. “What’s with these homies dissin’ my girl/Why do they gotta front?” But somehow, it sounds exactly like something a Rivers Cuomo type would say if he were trying to sound cool or ironic or something. It works, somehow. And the song really holds up overall. This was Weezer’s big breakout single, accompanied by an incredible video directed by Spike Jonze. It’s fucking great. Unimpeachable. Right? I don’t really know anymore, but I love it still, and I know we’ve arrived in the perfect warm center of this record.

Yes, I like this one.

5. Undone – The Sweater Song

The song covered by every high school garage band from 1994 through… well, maybe still. The chord progression couldn’t get any simpler or more repetitive, but it builds and climbs and expands and explodes into a goddam anthem, while still remaining approachable. Anyone could pick up a guitar and stumble through those three power chords over and over and over and over (even the plucked part is pretty easy). And if you had a distortion pedal, congrats, you could play the chorus, too. We all knew the talky part by heart, and the “woah, woah, whoa-y-oh” stuff. The Superman skivvies line. Are there flaws in this song? No. Have I gone full nostalgia mode? Perhaps.

A fine song.

6. Surf Wax America

The halfway point. Side two, if you’re into that. I remember wondering… “These guys surf?” I still suspect the answer is no, but maybe this is more latent Beach Boys influence? Doesn’t matter. Here we have the first example of calm quiet shoehorned into the middle of all the loud: a motif that will reappear in Holiday and again in Only In Dreams. It’s a tactic that I love. This could have been a shorter song. A simpler one. But instead, right as things are really taking off, everything stops on a dime. Then, a good 30 seconds of dwelling on electric piano, falsetto harmony and dreamy potential guitar-solo energy before launching back into the action. It doesn’t matter if you surf, drive or have a job. You can’t not love this song.

Another winner.

7. Say It Ain’t So

I’m at my grandmother’s house. It’s summertime and all there is to do is watch cable tv, which is a luxury to be found only at the homes of friends and relatives. MTV still plays videos, and this one pops up a lot, in between the Blues Traveler and Counting Crows and Montell Jordan. These guys are dorks, but they’re in a band. They play hacky sack. The only people I know who play hacky sack are the cool skater kids who wear baggy jeans, but these guys are doing it, and when they do it, they look like even bigger dorks. Is this a jazz song? The chorus is definitely not jazz. This is heavy shit. He’s yelling about his dad like he’s about to cry. I love this.

Probably the best song on the record.

8. In The Garage

Here it is. The song that really sums it all up for Weezer kids everywhere. “I’m gonna sit in my room and read comics and listen to music that no one else seems to earnestly like and wait for some real peers to show up in my life” is what this song seems to say. For a lot of people my age, Weezer was our Kitty Pryde. Our Ace Frehley. Weezer was the pop culture unifier that ended up bonding us to our first real friends. Not the ones that were friends by default because they lived across the street, but the ones that our shared obsessions led us to. The ones we discovered through common fanaticisms. The ones that we’re still friends with now.

I’m sorry, am I reviewing a song or going down a rabbit hole of contemplation? There’s not a lot that needs to be said about this song, so I’ll just point out that until now, I never noticed that the guitar disappears during the “I’ve got an electric guitar” verse. It’s just fuzz bass until “I love every ONE.”

Brilliant.

9. Holiday

A celebratory album-closer that doesn’t actually close out the album, this song continues the lets-get-real-quiet-for-a-minute tradition established a couple songs back. This time, the falsetto is replaced with a low baritone and finger snaps and something about Jack Kerouac, and when the quiet part is done things get even louder than they were before. Great as that section is, my favorite part is when everything stops mid “holi-” and the organ takes over for a two-count before the song kicks back in and one voice out of many sings “-day” while all the other voices have already moved on to the next thing. And the end of the song is so conclusive, you almost want to take off your headphones and walk away satisfied, even though you know there’s one more track.

A fine little tune.

10. Only In Dreams

Come to think of it, I did often walk away from this record without listening to Only In Dreams. It took some friend or another pointing out how good it is or maybe singing it to themselves randomly for me to stop skipping the real closer. An epic love anthem to end an album full of epics, love songs and anthems. The LOUDquietLOUD in this song is more like quietquieterquiet, but it might be the most effective example of the trope on the record. The tempo doesn’t actually change, but listening to that ride cymbal go from eighth notes to quarters to halves to wholes to nothing and back again, moving on to a crescendo of sixteenth notes, joined by snare and crash, gives the illusion that this sleepy love song is speeding to its end, but it’s really just achieving full arena-rock epicness at the same slow pace that was there from the beginning.

If Jonas is a perfect overture for this symphony, this is the perfect finale.

The Verdict: 

What do you think, I’m not gonna give this an almost perfect score? A couple of bumpy spots aside, I’m not surprised that my overall opinion of this record hasn’t changed since I was a child in the middle bench seat of the family minivan, burning through AA batteries in my off-brand portable CD player. I’ll dock it a couple points for one instance of problematic lyrics and one instance of slight boringness, but overall a strong showing.

Final Grade: A-