Hurley

Hurley should be terrible. The name and the album cover are utterly disposable, it came a year after another disposable album with a terrible name and a stupid album cover. So, I had zero expectations when I put it on, especially after the fairly dispiriting listens of Maladroit, the Red Album, the White Album, and Pacific Daydream each of which just kept hammering home the point that Weezer isn't really the fun, brash, nerdy, charming band that I thought they were with the Blue album. They are, in fact, the very essence of The Ugly American: loud, crass, dumb, and immature. 

Honestly, so much listening to Weezer reminded me of the criticism levelled at America by the British botanist in It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World:

And this positively infantile preoccupation with bosoms! In all my time in this wretched, godforsaken country, the one thing that has appalled me most of all is this preposterous preoccupation with bosoms. Don't you realize they have become the dominant theme in American culture: in literature, advertising and all fields of entertainment and everything. I'll wager you anything you like: if American women stopped wearing brassieres, your whole national economy would collapse overnight.

But, ohmygoodness, that first listen of Hurley was a shocker. It was like like they had figured out how to take the sound of 00s punk pop and married it with the traditional 90s Weezer sound AND it seemed that Rivers had finally figured out how not to write lyrics that were (a) misogynistic, (b) completely obsessed with how to get girls, and (c) basic. (I don't even know how to describe that last criticism. It's like talking to someone who is actively trying to bore you so that you will leave them alone, so they provide a stark description of what they have done in a day with no adjectives.)

Trainwrecks was the highlight of my first listen. A soaring teenage/early 20 somethings anthem that celebrates life even when it's a disaster. I played it five times in a row and thought, "This is the best thing they have done since the Blue Album." (Yeah, I know, total cliche.) But everything else seemed uniformly good except for the excretable "Where's My Sex?" 

(The scene: Rivers, sitting on a piano bench in his front room, strumming a couple of chords, humming to himself, scribbling some thoughts, playing another chord, sits straight up, and, in awe, says, "That's it." He starts writing furiously and then calls to his wife. "Honey, the muse has spoken to me! Listen to this!" He then plays "Where's My Sex?" on acoustic guitar after which his wife takes his guitar gently from his hands and snaps the neck over her knee. She then calmly picks up the lyric sheet, holds it an inch in front of his face, and says "Where is it? I'll show you where it is." Ripping the lyric sheet into long strips, she licks each strip, rolls each into a spitball, and shoves each ball up Rivers's nose. )

I should have written my review right then. Instead, flush on excitement about my new favorite Weezer album, I made a crucial mistake. I pushed play again. And again. Like frolicking through a verdant meadow, those second and third passes revealed some unfortunately rank things that sunk deep into the treads of my soul.

Like any decent tragedy, the seeds of my sadness were sown in the very thing that I once loved. Up top, I said that Hurley's title and picture seemed so disposable that it was for 2010 only and nothing beyond. Well, Trainwrecks has a jarringly disposable line: "We don't update our blogs." It's so banal and completely out of place with the larger theme of the song. It's lazy and, eleven years later, so anachronistic. (Blogs?? Who does that any more?)

And, just like that, things started spinning out of control. I started picking up the classic Rivers loutishness in Memories, Ruling Me, Run Away, and Smart Girls and my excitement turned into bitter disappointment at getting suckered by Weezer yet again. The other day, I gave Hurley a farewell listen, and, to my surprise, I realized I had short-changed about half the album: Unspoken, Hang On, Brave New World, and Time Flies are all really good songs and I found myself able to acknowledge that Trainwrecks considerable strengths outweighs its one bad line. Which makes this the best album ever named after a character from Lost.