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| Weezer (Red Album) [Deluxe] | ![Weezer (Red Album) [Deluxe]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/518hAqGOVeL._SL160_.jpg)
 enlarge | Artist: Weezer
Label: Geffen Records
Category: Music
List Price: $19.98
Buy New: $10.86
You Save: $9.12 (46%)
New (41) Used (10) from $10.86
Avg. Customer Rating:  114 reviews
Sales Rank: 909
Format: Extra Tracks
Media: Audio CD
Discs: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 5.6 x 5 x 0.5
MPN: 001133602
UPC: 602517726451
EAN: 0602517726451
ASIN: B00188HR3G
Release Date: June 3, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand new Item. CD, DVD, Book, VHS more than 400 000 titles to choose from. ALL days Low Price !
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| Customer Reviews:
 Confused by the extreme reactions to this album. June 6, 2008
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
Is this Weezer's best album? No. It is their worst? No. Is it their strangest? Definitely. It would seem to me, though, that people are either so enamored with the band or so enamored with the past they've lost a critical ear. But let's take it song by song:
1. Troublemaker -- Fairly standard Weezer fare, really, although a bit more pop than perhaps their earlier stuff. Enjoyable, but not really memorable.
2. The Greatest Man That Ever Lived -- Yes, it's strange and rarely repeats -- save for the main chorus -- but each section is pretty catchy on it's own. They lyrics are pretty hilarious.
3. Pork and Beans -- Again, fairly standard Weezer fare, backed by a great video. It's pretty catchy, but not really that interesting.
4. Heart Songs -- Yes, it sounds a bit cheesy when it starts, but it's a great song, backed by an experience we all share: those songs that never leave you, that will always be important no matter how much time passes. It builds really nicely, too.
5. Everybody Get Dangerous -- For what it's worth, I liked "We Are All On Drugs," which probably informs my opinion of this song. I enjoy the heck out of it. The chord changes are great and the lyrics are hilarious -- a great job of taking me back to my youth and a legitimate question: what do we do when our kids act like we did?
6. Dreamin' -- An obvious single, made less obvious by the outro, which is really cool. A good song and classic Weezer.
7. Thought I Knew -- Yes, Brian sings lead on this. And, yes, it doesn't sound like a Weezer song at all, even on a album that's redefining what a "Weezer" song is. On it's own merits, this might be a great song, but it's simply too jarring to hear on the album.
8. Cold Dark World -- Scott sings lead on this one and it's much less jarring to me. I actually like this song. It's fairly driving and Scott delivers his vocals a lot like Rivers (who sings on the choruses).
9. Automatic -- I think this might be Pat on vocals here. Again, a twist from Weezer, but not completely different. It's an okay song. I think a big problem people might have with this album is the fact that these three songs come in a row.
10. The Angel and The One -- This is a great song. This is classic, heartfelt Weezer. I read a review where someone said this album didn't have the emotional appeal that previous Weezer albums have had, and while that might be true on a whole, this song (and Heart Songs) just really hit home.
BONUS TRACKS
11. Miss Sweeney -- I agree with a previous reviewer -- this song makes the bonus album a required purchase. It's just a great song and Rivers' vocal delivery is just so great. It's songs like this that make you realize just how creative Weezer can be.
12. Pig -- Another good one, kind of folksy, kind of earthy, but still quirky in that Weezer way.
13. The Spider -- Yeah, it's a little bizarre and kind of sounds like one of Rivers' home recordings. It might grow on me in time, but now it's just kind of there.
14. King -- Man, I don't know if Scott writes the vocal lines and lyrics or if Rivers handles that and just has Scott sing it, but I have to say that he's pretty freaking great. This is probably better than "Cold Dark World."
Overall, I think it's a good album. I'd have given it 3 and a half stars initially, but I'm sure it will earn the extra half a star going forward.
 I Don't Want to Be an Old Man, Anymore June 9, 2008
7 out of 13 found this review helpful
The single "Pork and Beans" set high expectations for a Weezer album with more than one contributor (save "Blue" and "Pinkerton": Weezer had to retroactively pay Matt Sharp for uncredited song-writing contributions)... while "Pork and Beans" was no "El Scorcho" or even "You Gave Your Love to Me Softly", it hinted at the sort of naked vulnerability that endured Weezer to a generation of fans in the first place. While it did have clumsy lyrics that included references to Timbaland and Oakley, it has a sing-along chorus accompanied with the kind of big crunchy guitars Cheap Trick used to "toughen" up their best candy-coated pop rock.
The first track on the album, "Troublemaker" is catchy enough, but the lyrics are often clumsy and downright bad... "only stupid books that offer batty crooks" is the kind of "forced" rhyming that is more clumsy (Mindbender Steve of "Areas of my Expertise" clumsy) than it is clever. But the song certainly has the kind of "heavy pop" sound that seems to be the hallmark of latter-day Weezer. This flows reasonably well into "The Greatest Man That Ever Lived", which borrows heavily from Queen and a little of David Bowie. The song is a vast improvement, lyrically, but this new "swaggering rock star" personna Rivers has adopted seems forced (a man who once sang about D&D, wore comic book t-shirts, and drank juice boxes in music videos).
"Pork and Beans" is easily the strongest track on the album... and offers the last decent song to be had. Its verse guitar riff sounds similar to the type of riffing on "El Scorcho" and the song really is a good single, and a good way to sell an album that becomes harder and harder to hear.
Then the music turns sour: "Heart Songs" is embarassing. The musician ship itself is competent, but the melody and structure is pure radio-garbage: fodder for the $.99 bin. The lyrics are goofy, and full of technical errors (Debbie Gibson did not sing "I think we're alone now", that would have been Tiffany) and odd name-dropping. Never before (that I have heard and I have read lots of interviews and weezer.com for years) has Rivers name dropped Nirvana as an influence... it was always "The Pixies" and bands of that ilk (the only tribute album they have played on is the "Where is My Mind?" compilation). That alone makes the song appear like some kind of "appeal to the unwashed masses" (who still revere Nirvana more than most critics or any music geek ever has).
As if that song was not clumsy enough (and not vulnerable and endearing, like "In the Garage"), it leads into "Everybody Get Dangerous" a song that is immediately horrible: the lyrics are just bad, like high school poetry bad. Example, "when I was younger... I used to go and tip cows for fun, yeah... actually I didn't do that.. cause I didn't want the cow to be sad" and that might actually be a high point in a song that has a refrain of "boo-yah". As an aside: nonsense lyrics can be artistically meaningful by evoking imagery (ala Blood Brothers or even Captain Beefheart, not to mention ATDI and The Mars Volta) or being phonetically interesting, but Rivers fails on all of these points. His lyrics are best when they are clever and slightly painfully honest... enjoying being a geek, not enjoying being a rock star. Even "Make Believe" does a better job of this.
"Dreaming" is a little better and could have been on an earlier post-Sharp album, the lyrics are better than almost any others on the album, it just never really takes off. It does hint at the Green Album's lightness more than any other song on the red album. But it's just not that fantastic of a song.
"Thought I Knew" is a bad, bad song. Bad lyrics, clumsy references, a sound that is a clone of Uncle Kracker and Kid Rock (seriously)... it doesn't even fit on this album, so there's little point in deriding it more.
"Cold Dark World" starts with a clumsy, overused bad bass line and some more of these "bad can o'lyrics" shenanigans that fill this album. Rivers wrote the lyrics, so that isn't the fault of Mr Shriner, whose singing isn't as hammy as some of the other "band member contributions" on the album. There is some annoying talky-wah shenanigans under the chorus.
Pat's contribution pretty much sounds like every "Special Goodness" song I've ever heard... boring late 90s alterna-crap, the time period before indie bands started getting mainstream popular and this kind of junk drove more and more kids to reading Pitchfork.
The standard album closes out with "The Angel and The One" which is certainly a step up from the last few tracks. Still not very powerful, but it sort of grows on you.
The bonus tracks are equally forgettable, sounding largely like experiments gone wrong, and leftovers. "Miss Sweeney" is the only one worth hearing of the lot, "The Spider" sounds like some kind of Who/Entwistle tribute... well the title does, the song just sucks.
Sadly, it appears that Weezer has run out of steam. Honoring other band members by allowing them to contribute would only make sense if the other member's were as good of songwriters as Rivers or Matt are/were/are... but all of the band members side projects have been pretty bad, only the devout (or insane... I kid) would enjoy them. With the Rentals recording new music that still sounds good ("The Last Little Life EP" is actually pretty good), one has to wonder if that magic of Mr Sharp and Mr Cuomo will never come back. At this point, I'd even appreciate another Green Album or Maladroit and the first three tracks almost allude to that.
The album is schizophrenic, but not in a good way. Unlike Pinkerton, this isn't a "hard to take" album that will grow on you. It makes you wonder if (combined with the lyrics of tracks 2 & 3) Rivers is just messing with everyone. It does more to reinforce Weezer as a "Pavement-light" band than anything else we've heard.
If, like me, you hold eternal hope for Weezer, you will buy this album, be disappointed and put it on the shelf next to Make Believe. Like many bands with tireless fan-bases, Weezer can almost do no wrong. Even when they suck.
Heart Breaking... June 4, 2008
6 out of 9 found this review helpful
... and not in the "oh my, that's so beautiful" way... but in the, "I can't believe Weezer has done this to their sound" way.
From the opening, insipid lyrics of the first track (okay, okay, you might say the lyrics of the first track are MEANT to be horrible, simple, and cheap rhymes... but, c'mon! there are ways to have simple/stupid lyrics and still be clever.) to the post-emo, bleeding-heart warblings of the latter "ballads" I couldn't help but wonder what happened to the band I fell in love with?
Yes, I know their sound continues to "evolve". Pinkerton was a miles away from The Blue Album, but I still loved it. The Green Album's sound was nowhere near Pinkerton, but I grew to like it. And I thought the "we're a rockin' band" outlook that they seemed to have settled into, for their last albums was great.
But this album doesn't rock. It kinda...well... it kinda... "squishes"... in the way only a middle-of-the-road album can.
I guess what's more disappointing is that they released "Pork and Beans" as their first single from the album (the one song on the disc that does "rock") leading me to believe I was in for a non-stop, er... (for lack of a better phrase) ROCK-FEST.
It's SO not rockin'.
My advice? Buy the "Pork and Beans" single and enjoy it while trying to forget that a new Weezer album came out, at all.
...
...
Looking over my review, I see I've used the words "ROCK" and "Rockin' " way more times in one post than any sane person should, so I end my review right here. Perhaps to go off and buy a thesaurus.
Weezer R.I.P. 2008 June 8, 2008
6 out of 12 found this review helpful
Wow, this might be the worst album by weezer ever (i never thought i'd say that after maladroit). to think this is the same band that made Pinkerton, one of the best albums of all time. This album made me sad to think of what has come of the same band that wrote "Good Life." lament.
worth the wait June 3, 2008
5 out of 7 found this review helpful
If your wanting to buy the new Weezer album, I recommend you buy the deluxe version for the 4 extra tracks. I think waiting three years for a new album was worth the wait.
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