auto

01 Beverly Hills
02 Perfect Situation
03 This Is Such a Pity
04 Hold Me
05 Peace
06 We Are All on Drugs
07 The Damage in Your Heart
08 Pardon Me
09 My Best Friend
10 The Other Way
11 Freak Me Out
12 Haunt You Everyday


I'll be seeing these guys in Indio, California on the last day of April....

Rubix

can't wait for this album, but i hope it sounds nothing like the scrapped demos, which were ok, but not anywhere near album worthy for weezer.

paulringodaman

I just hope that this album leads to a tour...There is a good vibe at Weezer shows.

auto

Looks like May 10th is the release date.

edit: Just noticed we now have two Weezer threads. One should be closed.

KV12482

The first single, "Beverly Hills," was played on the radio for the first time ever yesterday and leaked online minutes later. So, start searching the weezer message boards if you want to hear it.

auto

Here is a very short clip of Beverly Hills.

The Weezer message boards are all trashing the song as one of their worst ever. I guess we'll have to wait and see if the lp follows suit.

starseed1981

I'm not trying to sound juvenile or anything, but "Beverly Hills" sucks. Plain and simple.

auto

Weezer get worse with every album. No one denies that. It's a shame.

auto

Tracklisting revealed:

01 Beverly Hills
02 Perfect Situation
03 This Is Such a Pity
04 Hold Me
05 Peace
06 We Are All on Drugs
07 The Damage in Your Heart
08 Pardon Me
09 My Best Friend
10 The Other Way
11 Freak Me Out
12 Haunt You Everyday

Upcoming tour dates:

04-26 Vancouver, BC - Commodore Ballroom
04-27 Seattle, WA - Paramount Theater
04-29 San Francisco, CA - Warfield
04-30 Indio, CA - Empire Polo Field (Coachella)
05-03 Minneapolis, MN - First Avenue
05-04 Chicago, IL - Aragon Ballroom
05-05 Detroit, MI - State Theater
05-06 Toronto, Ontario - Kool Haus/The Dock
05-08 Boston, MA - Orpheum Theater
05-10 Philadelphia, PA - Electric Factory
05-11 New York, NY - Roseland Ballroom
05-12 New York, NY - Roseland Ballroom
05-14 Atlanta, GA - Tabernacle
06-03 Nurburgring, Germany - Rock am Ring
06-04 Nurnberg, Germany - Rock im Park
06-05 Hamburg, Germany - Grosse Freheit
06-07 Dublin, Ireland - TBA
06-08 Paris, France - The Olympia
06-10 Nickelsdorf, Austria - Pannonia Fields (Nova Rock Festival)
06-13 Birmingham, England - Birmingham Academy
06-14 London, England - Brixton Academy
06-15 London, England - Brixton Academy
06-17 Glasgow, Scotland - Carling Academy
08-13 Osaka, Japan - WTC (Summersonic Festival)
08-14 Tokyo, Japan - Marine Stadium (Summersonic Festival)

auto

Btw, does anyone know if Weezer is still planning a tour with the Pixies?

I would love to see the Pixies again and my g/f wants to see Weezer.

Buttmunker

I must be in the minority by saying I like Beverly Hills. It sounds like a return, of sorts, to their first album, which I absolutely loved.

I didn't like any subsequent albums after the first one. I didn't even like the song Hash Pipe

badger1997

I personally would deny that.

Absolut

Me too

auto

Saw these guys at Coachella and the new stuff seemed much better live. I'm just hoping for a solid summer record.

zak52

Listen to the new album at Myspace

http://www.myspace.com/weezer

starseed1981

The entire album is up for LEGAL download @

http://www.audiojunkies.net/

have fun.

Rubix

why is it legal exactly? they are posting the rns rip btw.

franchise01

Any reviews out there yet?

starseed1981

That website is supported by Geffen, Weezer's record company. If you have went to any over there shows over the past week you will also notice that site is one of the ones painted on the back of the "Make Believe" van.

cungar

allmusic.com loves it: 4 stars

Review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine
As a Rolling Stone cover story on newsstands the week before the release of Make Believe made clear, Weezer leader Rivers Cuomo is an odd, ornery sort. He's a genuine rock & roll maverick, at once attracted and repelled by his star status, disappearing for long stretches at a time, often to return to college. He writes and records far more songs than whatever winds up on a final Weezer record, which are often whittled down to just 30 or 40 minutes, leaving untold numbers of songs in the vaults. What makes the situation even stranger is for as obstinate and unpredictable as he is, Cuomo does not make odd music: he's a pop songwriter fronting a hard rock band, equally enamored with big choruses and loud guitars. While each of Weezer's records has a defining characteristic — whether it's a sound, a lyrical theme, or simply an emotional feel — that separates it from its predecessor, each album is clearly written from the same perspective: that of a brainy misfit raised on cheap metal and new wave, whose nerdiness always kept him on the outside looking in. This was true even after Cuomo became a star, thanks in large part to how he had a gift for articulating how very awkward he felt within the constructs of a catchy, melodic, concise pop song. But as rock stars since Elvis have learned, fans are a demanding lot, especially when they identify so heavily with a specific work, as Weezer's cult did with Pinkerton, the band's second album. It flopped upon its 1996 release but became a word-of-mouth hit over the next five years, leading up to their eagerly awaited comeback, Weezer, their second eponymous album that is otherwise known as The Green Album. Appropriately for a self-titled affair, Weezer functioned as an introduction to a new incarnation of a band, one that sounded similar but had a different outlook: namely, one that was deliberately notintrospective, a conscious shift away from plaintive introspection of Pinkerton. The Green Album and its quickly released 2002 follow-up, Maladroit, were both sharply written, tightly constructed, quite excellent, and popular rock records, but that didn't stop some fans from grumbling that neither album was as affecting as Pinkerton.

Those same fans will likely not be happy with Cuomo's return to musical, emotional bloodletting with 2005's Make Believe. It may be a spiritual cousin to Pinkerton, yet it's far removed from the raw, nervy immediacy of that album. Nearly ten years separate the two records, a long time by any measure, so it shouldn't be a surprise that Cuomo has a far different emotional outlook here. On Make Believe he purposely avoids the pain and torture of Pinkerton, where the guitars exploded and scraped, complementing the torment in his lyrics. Here, Cuomo is trying to sort things out, sometimes beating himself up over past mistakes, sometimes looking at his surroundings sardonically, but something separates Make Believe from previous Weezer albums: a palpable sense of optimism, a feeling of hope, a new positivity. That's not really what the legions of Pinkerton fans are looking for. They're likely going to find some of his lyrics perilously close to a self-help manual, particularly when Cuomo writes a sappy ode to his best friend — and it's pretty much a given that they won't respond to Rick Rubin's sleek, layered, propulsive production, which makes Weezer sound far more new wave than Ric Ocasek ever did. (Rubin also keeps the band far away from the pseudo-new wave of the Killers and the Bravery, which is why he's a highly paid pro.) But let those fans pine for the past, because the very things that they'll find irritating about Make Believe are what make it yet another first-rate Weezer record. Part of the band's appeal is that Cuomo not only skirts the edge of embarrassment, he frequently passes far beyond it, and while that very trait is irritating in the hands of lesser-talented emo bands, in Rivers, it's quite ingratiating and endearing because he has the musical skills to back up his self-analysis. He never overwrites, either in his words or melodies, his songs are carefully, precisely crafted pop, and his love of metal and rock gives his music muscle and balls. These gifts are as evident on Make Believe as they had been on every other Weezer record — the only difference is this has a lighter, brighter feel than any of its predecessors, not just in the music but in its outlook. It might not be what Weezer fans want, but as that aforementioned Rolling Stone article made clear, Cuomo never cared much about that in the first place. If they're not immediately taken with Make Believe, give it time. After all, Pinkerton didn't win fans immediately.

auto

Pitchfork does not.

Weezer
Make Believe
[Interscope; 2005]
Rating: 0.4 (out of 10.0)

If you're one of those poor souls who while away the day job by keeping a scorecard of music review sites, there's one thing you already know: There are two distinct groups of bad albums. The more prevalent kind is the fodder that fills a critic's mailbox, bands with awkward names and laser-printed cover art that don't inspire ire so much as pity. The second group is more treacherous: Bands that yield high expectations due to past achievements, yet, for one reason or another, wipe out like "The Wide World of Sports"' agony-of-defeat skier.

Often, these albums are bombarded with website tomatoes for reasons you can't necessarily hear through speakers: the band changes their sound and image to court a new crossover audience, perhaps, or attempts a mid-career shift into ill-advised territory. Or maybe they start writing songs about Moses in hip-hop slang. But sometimes the bad album in question is none of the above; it doesn't offend anyone's delicate scene-politics sensibilities or try to rewrite a once-successful formula in unfortunate ways. Sometimes an album is just awful. Make Believe is one of those albums.

Weezer have been given a lot of breaks in their second era-- both The Green Album and Maladroit were cut miles of slack despite consisting of little more than slightly above-average power-pop. The obvious reason for this lenience has to do with the mean age of rock critics, and the fact that most of these mid-20s scribes were at their absolute peak for bias-forming melodrama when The Blue Album and Pinkerton were released. Even for someone like me, who came late to the Weezer appreciation club, it was impossible to hear these "comeback" albums without the echoes of the earlier alt-rock pillars ringing in our ears.

But now there's an antidote to that nostalgic interference. Right from the start of Make Believe, when Weezer lurches into a flaccid take on Joan Jett's "I Love Rock N' Roll" with an unfathomably horrible speak/sing vocal from Rivers Cuomo (think "I like girls who wear Abercrombie & Fitch"), you can hear hundreds of critics mouthing "no no no" and going into crumpled shock. What's more disconcerting is that the song gets worse over the course of its three minutes (let's just say "Framptonesque voicebox solo" and get back to repressing the memory)-- and it's the album's first single.

Hearing a song like "We Are All on Drugs", which nicks the classic melody of the schoolyard "Diarrhea" song (you know, "when you're sliding into first..." and so on) for an anti-drug message stiffer than Nancy Reagan's "Diff'rent Strokes" cameo, it calls into question whether The Blue Album was really that great, or whether it just stood out as a rare beacon of guitar pop in a grunge-obsessed era. Trying to wrap your mind around the land-cliché-record lyrics of songs like "My Best Friend" and "Haunt You Every Day" leads me to wonder how Pinkerton could ever have seemed like such a cathartically resonant treatise on unrequited love. Was Rivers Cuomo always on the notebook-scrawl level of "I don't feel the joy/ I don't feel the pain," and did we not notice because scrawling in notebooks was the depth of our emotional knowledge at the time?

Okay, let's not be so hard on ourselves here: I'm pretty sure this is all Rivers' fault. Pinkerton triumphed by being an uncomfortably honest self-portrait of Cuomo. On Make Believe, his personality has vanished beneath layers of self-imposed universality, writing non-specific power ballads like he apprenticed with Diane Warren, and whoah-oh-ohing a whole lot in lieu of coming up with coherent or interesting thoughts. Coupled with his continued obsession with tired power chords and bland riff-rock (surprisingly not sonically boosted by producer Rick Rubin, whose post-"99 Problems" grip on relevance is now officially spent), the creative driving force behind the Weez is asleep at the wheel.

Considering Weezer supposedly went through hundreds of songs and several discarded albums to arrive at this final product, the laziness of this songwriting borders on the offensive. Whether recycling dynamics from the band's back catalog (see: "Perfect Situation") or taking the easy Mother Goose rhyme (see: every fucking song here), these 12 tracks sound as if they were dashed off in an afternoon's work, maybe with Rubin holding the band at gunpoint. The one half-decent song on the record, "This Is Such a Pity", fails to even maintain its status as a pleasant Cars homage, interjecting a guitar solo that sounds like it was cut from the original score to Top Gun.

So does Make Believe completely ruin not just present-day Weezer, but retroactively, any enjoyment to be had from their earlier work? I don't know-- I'm too scared to re-listen to those first two albums-- but it certainly appears that Make Believe will expertly extract the last remaining good graces the critical community has to offer latter-day Weezer, unless my colleagues' memories of slow-dancing with Ashley to "Say It Ain't So" are more powerful than I can possibly imagine. Of course, if Ashley went on to break your heart, fellow critic, Make Believe might be just the medicine you need; put it on repeat and watch your emotional scar be obliterated as collateral damage in the torpedoing of Weezer's legacy.

DJLinus

A .4 rating? Wow. Reminds me of when Stylus gave Eminem's Encore a 0 (sure, it was a sub-par effort, but a 0?). There was a lengthy discussion on that site on what kind of album merited a rating so low.

I downloaded the album from the link above and listened to it once. On first impression, I like it better than Maladroit. I'll be picking it up tomorrow. Of course, I'm one of the handful that really likes The Green Album.

cungar

Whether you think this is a good, so so or not so great Weezer album it doesn't deserve the kind of pissing on that Pitchfork reserves for bands it feels a certain disdain for. At it's worst it's a dozen professionally written and performed catchy songs by an able quartet. The fact that some neo metal rap band like Mudvayne or whatever will probably get more stars than this just shows that Pitchfork is a joke in the record review department.

TripWire

I think pretty much everything in that Pitchfork review is true, Maladroit and the Green album wasn't judged as harshly as it should of been for the content of what was actually on the albums..I hate this new album and I think it's all fodder, their style has become so predictable and formulatic that I get bored listening to them after 3 minutes, which is how long their songs are usually anyways. I mean Rick Rubin and hundreds of songs to choose from supposedly, and this is the best they can come up with? I usually don't agree with Pitchfork, I mean they will probably trash the new NIN album if they ever review it. But, what in this Weezer record is good exactly? Please enlighten me why one would want to continue to listen to this band? I am open to suggestions, I'm not bashing, I just don't get why this band is held in such high regard anymore, it's obvious Rivers Cuomo is a prick who doesn't even really care about being in a band anyways, it's just like this convenient way of him channeling whatever depression he has in hundreds of pop songs.
I think bands should get back to quality over quantity, not about how big of a discography you can have over the years.

porieux

Beverly Hills has to be one of the lamest songs i've heard in a while...what the heck were they thinking??? Weezer were never all that good in the first place, but they were better than that.