A couple of years later and I'm listening to Pinkerton. I listened to it a few months ago and loved The Good Life and Falling for You, but overall listened to it very briefly. I'm enjoying it quite a lot!
Take it from a Weezer expert.
The Blue Album and
Pinkerton are both very different from one another but are both absolutely flawless - they're deservedly considered as alt-rock classics now.
The Green Album is different from its predecessor once again but it's seriously underrated - it's 28 minutes of concise, jet-engine streamlined power pop, and you can't ask for much more.
Maladroit is much crunchier and grungier in sound, and it's got a handful of great riffs and choruses, but it's pretty scattershot and mostly just okay.
Make Believe is a little underrated, but only in the sense that it's average rather than terrible like everyone thinks - it's got a couple of good numbers on there but it gets very tired over its duration.
The Red Album is just about tolerable, it's worth it for 'Pork and Beans' and 'The Greatest Man That Ever Lived', but beyond that it's a pretty annoying record with a second half that's a sketchy, lazy waste of time.
Raditude is very bad - maddeningly, comically bad. Hurley is something of an uptick in form and it's a very noisy, thick-sounding record, but it's still too silly to really take seriously.
Everything Will Be Alright In the End is something of a return to form - nothing on the level of the first three albums but certainly considered and diverse enough, it has 'Cleopatra' which was the first genuinely great Weezer song for years at that point.
The White Album has a smaller palette but does just much with it as the previous album, has 'L.A. Girlz' which is the first Weezer song I'd felt affectionate towards for ages by that stage.
Their output between 2005 and 2010 is best avoided unless you're really, really curious to see how bad they got. Between 2008 and 2010 they just started trolling people: Rivers started donning massive cowboy hats, white suits and ugly moustaches, and their music started to mean nothing on purpose. Quite a lot of the lyrics were deliberately disconnected so quite a lot of the songs they wrote had no real central theme. There are a few exceptions, and on albums like Make Believe,
The Red Album and
Hurley there are a handful of good songs. But
The Red Album,
Raditude and
Hurley were all released within the same three year spell and you couldn't even form a decent 10-track album from the thirty songs spread across them. Like I said, unless you're really, really, really curious they're just best avoided when there are thousands of other things you could be checking out.
