(The Green Album)
Released May 15th, 2001
THIS REVIEW IS A WORK-IN-PROGRESS!
Ah, The Green Album. Weezer's grand return from five years of hiatus. Matt Sharp is out, and best boy Mikey Welsh is in. (May he rest in peace.) The Green Album, all things considered, should have been really great. They had such a long time to perfect their songs, Rivers Cuomo went to Harvard, Mikey Welsh was there, it should be great! Right? Well, look at that runtime. 28 minutes. To be blunt, I don't think The Green Album is good at all. The Green Album is, honestly, the worst Weezer album I have listened to as of writing this review. Today, I will deconstruct just why I dislike this album so much, from start to finish.
Let's start with Don't Let Go. This is the song that has greeted every single one of my relistens to this album in my pursuit of understanding it, and what greeted the Weezer fans of the world back in 2001 after four and a half years of hiatus (well, in terms of an actual album, we'll come back to that later). The last we heard from Weezer was Butterfly, a song absolutely dripping with honest emotion. The last thing we'd ever heard from Rivers was him repeating "I'm sorry." But it's the new millenium now, and what is the first word out of his mouth for Weezer's triumphant return? Not a word, even. "Ooh, woah-oh." Really, Don't Let Go isn't that bad of a song. It has a decently catchy melody, and the chorus is fun. The "ooh-woah"s remind me of Buddy Holly a little, except they don't have nearly as much of an effect. The sentiment of this song is very simple, it's just a laid-back song about loving a girl a lot and not wanting her to leave. The guitars are calm and soft, which does fit a song like this, I suppose. I just think that if Rivers and the boys were on the same level as their earlier albums, they could've done something more interesting. Same with the vocal performance. It works, I guess. There's just no heart in it. It's nowhere close to what I, or really anyone, would've expected after the borderline emo of Pinkerton. This is the first we're hearing of Weezer since they stopped touring in 1997, and it's just... this. It's a fine song, but it isn't a very good Weezer song. They really screwed up their entrance, huh.
Second song is Photograph. In a leak of the track list from 2000, it was titled If You Want It. This was also the last single to be released from the Green Album. We'll get to the others later (obviously). It's better than Don't Let Go. There's actual feeling in Rivers' voice now, woah! He's having a grand old time! The prominent backing vocals are a huge plus for this song as well. It reminds me of Buddy Holly again, except this song doesn't use his name in vain. The guitars are closer to Weezer's trademark quality than in Don't Let Go too, no longer as basic as they were last time. It has some unique lines and turns of phrase that other artists probably would never use, like the second verse ("If you need it, you should show it, 'cuz you might play so monastic that you blow it") that remind me why I love Weezer again. Photograph is a bright, cheery, fun song, but it isn't as simple as it seems to be. It is very symmetrical in structure, but it's able to keep the same frame fresh somehow. Not to the same degree as some songs on the Blue Album were, like The World Has Turned And Left Me Here, but it's nowhere near as bad as it could have been. I'm a fan of Photograph, but not as much as the next two songs.
Next up is Hash Pipe. Hash Pipe was the first single off the Green Album, and was the actual first thing Weezer released after the hiatus. The Hash Pipe single actually released a month before the album did, but whatever I just learned this literally while writing the first draft of this and I'm not going back and rewriting the Don't Let Go section around that. Hash Pipe is a weird song. It's about a gay prostitute. It literally says "I got my ass wide" in the chorus. Or "ass wipe" if you prefer that. It's probably closer to metal than anything Weezer had made to this point, and personally, I love it. Pitchfork's infamously awful Green Album review cites this song as the point at which the author lost faith in Weezer, but I don't understand that at all. We'll get to where I temporarily lost faith in Weezer in a while. It's a very simple song, don't get me wrong. I learned how to play it (Brian Bell's part, at least) in like an hour, and I'm not even good at playing the guitar. It's even simpler than Don't Let Go or Photograph are, and yet they still chopped like 5 seconds off the chorus on the album version! That's Green Album for you, though. I think it still rocks in spite of that. It's hard to justify why I like this song so much after listing all its flaws, but I just find it charming. Also, it's kinda funny how we're 3 for 3 on songs with woahs in them so far.
You don't need me to introduce Island in the Sun. Anyone who has been alive in any year past 2001 has heard Island in the Sun at least once. According to Weezerpedia (the only good Weezer resource, unlike the FAKE NEWS Wikipedia), the thing has been officially released at least seventeen different times! This includes its two music videos! I'm not sure why they made two videos, but hey, why not? Island in the Sun is universally loved, and for good reason. It's yet another departure from the classic Weezer sound of Blue and Pinkerton, but that seems to be this album's whole deal, so I'll stop mentioning it from now on. It's similar to Butterfly's calmer instrumentation, except Island in the Sun isn't two straight minutes of Rivers Cuomo crying. It's a happy but not upbeat song about relaxing on a vacation and letting all your worries dissolve into the ocean for a while (but you still know they're waiting for when you get back). Instead of opting for a guitar sound that melts into the back of your head, Island in the Sun goes for a cleaner sound that almost sounds like an acoustic. This sound works wonders for a song like IitS, anything heavier wouldn't work at all. That is, except for the bridge, where the classic guitars come back in and there's more of a hopeful energy. If the bridge had kept the same sound as the rest of the song, like in the other Green Album songs, it wouldn't hit nearly as hard. Island in the Sun's popularity is definitely deserved (unlike one song I could mention, but we'll get to that when I listen to Make Believe). This does break our streak of songs with woahs in them, but the "hip hip"s before every verse are still vocal interjections, so we're still going strong!
Now, what could possibly be following my two favorite songs on the Green Album? Well, Crab sure is a song that exists. It's like a warning shot for the B-side. It's kinda like a weirder and worse reprise of Photograph, in that it keeps the same structure and melody the whole time. I do like it when Weezer embraces weird lyrics, but this is a step too far in my opinion. The song just doesn't really make sense. It uses crab as a verb, but not in any way that I've ever heard it before. Also, nobody says "T'ain't" as a shorter version of "it isn't". It just sounds like Rivers is talking about