Wow. It’s so…docile. So…lifeless.…I don’t know what else to type.

Weezer. This name should inspire some explosive pop-punk legend. But instead, it feels like all the finagling to get River Cuomo to release an album—the Howard Hughes recluse rumors, the Ivy League hiatus, the departure of bass player Matt Sharp to the Rentals, the urban myth of Cuomo destroying the master tapes for Weezer (1994) and Pinkerton, the label shuffling, being dropped and re-signed—all for this? This bland connect-the-dots pop-punk album? 

Pinkerton is really (and I mean this) a masterpiece, one of the most unfairly shit-on and underrated album of the ’90s. It bursts forth on each song with pop-punk fervor, embellishing with song-writing that seems perfectly called for, asked for, and used for the comic strip neurosis of Cuomo. (Dreaming of a fan from Japan, getting tired of groupie sex, falling for lesbians: pining of past pop found it’s pin to be deflated with.) It was rough around the edge (from the band’s own self-production), and didn’t spare a single bridge or sub-section in etching what ended up being flawless craft. And reading other reviews for Weezer 2001, some invariably write of some flawed previous album, with dirty sounds, its “anger,” a lack of a “Undone (The Sweater Song)”- or “Buddy Holly”-type pop single (how could you not want to join a punk band for a day after hearing “Tired of Sex,” “Across the Sea,” “The Good Life,” or “El Scorcho”?), and no Spike Jonze video. Weezer ’01 feels like the album that peeked its head up in the aftermath of the Pinkerton. Who knows if Cuomo, ever self-conscious and neurotic, read one too many bad review, decided to seek sanctuary in Weezer’s (’94) producer and former Cars leader Ric Ocasek, and kept his head hidden like a failed Dungeon & Dragons player.

Weezer ’01 is full of long hooks passed off as songs, all of which Cuomo seems unable to entwine himself around and embellish. Take “Hash Pipe”: there’s a bridge after the chorus—on Weezer (’94) or Pinkerton, said bridge would definitely last longer than eight beats and would invariably cling itself as a vital component of the song (as opposed to the interrupting burst it is here). Take “Smile”: its ending most assuredly would have been a false ending; it instead just drops off. Each song “bursts forth” with sluggish tempos (almost each song blandly runs together with 100-120 beats per minute), eschewing any punk numbers. And with the “hey hey”s on “Island in the Sun” sounding like lazy white suburban punk reggae—and the album’s other ubiquitous pot references—the daze sounds like a stoned record that has a buried chuckle at its own “commercial appeal.” (“Dude, we already used that record title!”)

Weezer (’94) and Pinkerton put Weezer ’01 to shame. The past albums’ b-sides “Susanne,” “Jamie,” and “You Gave Your Love to Me Softly” are collectively better than Weezer ’01. The pre-album KROQ-only single “The Christmas Song” is better than Weezer ’01. I think Rivers Cuomo reading Raymond Carver in a funny voice at Harvard circa 1997 would have been better than Weezer ’01. Simply put, this is horrible Weezer.

It feels like the band slept through the aftermath of Pinkerton, slept through its inception to emo, slept through all the worshipping of its spawned genre, slept through the sound emerging to a point of invisible success for it original prognosticators, and woke up only to ask “What’s this?” in time to make their own homogenized version. You get the feeling that Weezer is just placating to whatever they think current standards are, after having already made those standards—after making a perfect album that went unloved, the geeks took it as a smack into a confusion. And invariably, Weezer ’01 is the Abercrombie & Fitch of geek rock.