Western Oregon Journal

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            After a three-year hideaway, Weezer has returned and put out the album Make Believe. This is the band’s fifth record in its 13-year existence. Weezer’s first effort, dubbed the Blue Album, was well-received and immortalized with songs like “Undone (The Sweater Song)” and “Buddy Holly,” coat tailed by the hilarious Happy Days music video spoof.

            The band’s greatness can partially be attributed to the staying power in the genre of alternative rock. They rode out of the crashing wake of the grunge era, slid through a brief hard rock revival, a wilting class of copycat emo-rockers and still can hold fast in the current Indie scene. 

            Weezer has the innate and rare talent among musicians in modern pop music ¾ they can actually put out an album the listener can enjoy without skipping back and forth between tracks. Make Believe does just that.

            The band’s eccentric front man, Rivers Cuomo, is notorious for picking songs for albums out of a repertoire of hundreds of songs, and always at readiness to let the listener know of his loss, loneliness, and lack of ability to find that right girl. There is no shortage of punchy quips, dingy guitar riffs and Cuomo’s self-reflective lyrics on Make Believe.

            Each Weezer album is never a far cry from the last or the first, but always maintains distinctive differences. Make Believe has a flow true to Weezer’s form, an album easy to enjoy without having to rely heavily on a chiming radio single.

            The album dips and dives with commentaries on the silliness of celebrity life in the song “Beverly Hills,” where Cuomo claims his desire, within a great shadow of doubt, that he wants to live in 90210. After leaving the sunny hills, he blames our often-blind existence on a life rhetorically under the influence in the track “We Are All on Drugs.” But at the core of Believe, if not for an anomaly of contradictory traits in a well-known Weezer album, is a grandiose highlight of back-to-back groupings of the record’s best songs, “My Best Friend” and “The Other Way,” respectively, first claiming an unbound and honest friendship and a vow in saying, “You are such a blessing/And I won’t be messing,” only to turn on the next track to whine about his fears, rejections and simply putting “I always been a little shy/So I’ll turn and look the other way.”

            Weezer teamed up with producer Rick Ruben for their fourth record. Rubin is the mastermind behind The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ 1991 instant classic, multi-platinum and groundbreaking album Blood Sugar Sex Magik. Weezer.com reports limited tour dates for the band, and this summer will consist mainly of an international tour, with only two U.S. dates planned, the closest to the West Coast being in Las Vegas in early July. The twelve-track disc has special enhanced video features including a short documentary of the making of the new album and a behind the scenes look of the making of the “Beverly Hills” music video at the Playboy Mansion.

            Well worth purchasing, on a scale of 1-10, (1 being terrible, 10 being excellent) the fifth attempt from Weezer is a 9. Even if the band never really envelops a transformation, they have made an art of pounding out razor sharp and witty albums from the first guitar solo to a fading feedback, to the first lyrical humming to the last word on the page, Make Believe will make fans believe.

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