There’s a great moment in the movie High Fidelity where John Cusack and pals discuss what they believe to be the Top 5 best album openers. The characters in the movie each have their own selections but as far as this author is concerned, the award for Greatest Album Opener Of All Time belongs to one song only; My Name Is Jonas, three minutes and 24 seconds of rocktacular perfection which kicks off the 1994 self-titled debut by the band Weezer.
At the forefront of the 90s alternative watershed, Weezer were the odd ones out. Neither as serious as Nirvana nor as playful as Green Day, the space they occupied was somewhere in the middle, combining soaring power-pop melodies with a hefty dose of guitar wallop, like The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson (an inspiration who would loom over Weezer’s career) if he were reinterpreting Southern California punk rock. The band embraced the concept of rock musicians as awkward obsessives but put their own spin on it by adding a cozy suburban twist, with songs that referenced Kiss, Dungeons & Dragons and wistful love affairs. Their debut album, known informally as The Blue Album, was their calling card and a defining artistic statement which, to my ears, they have never bettered.
The greatest weapon in Weezer’s arsenal was singer, guitar shredder and main songwriter Rivers Cuomo, an enigmatic, insular metalhead whose musical diet combined Slayer with The Pixies and, crucially, The Beach Boys. Cuomo would cite The Beach Boys as a major inspiration on more than one occasion, even going so far as to borrow Brian Wilson’s mop-top-and-nerd-glasses schtick in the video for Undone (The Sweater Song), a cryptic alt-rock headfuck which was the band’s very first single, complete with a suitably tripped-out video directed by the Grand High Poobah of cool weird shit, Spike Jonze.
The Blue Album was produced by Rick Ocasek, head honcho of new wave rockers The Cars, themselves the spiritual godfathers for a slew of bands including Weezer. Ocasek’s influence on the band and their debut can’t be overstated, as it was he who guided Rivers and co. towards the warm, crunchy guitar tones which dominate the album, as well as keeping them on point when it came to songcraft. Nowhere is this more evident than on the album’s eighth track, In The Garage, a fond elegy to making a racket in an ubiquitous domestic space. This was a song that could only really have been written and played by the kids who stood at back of Metallica gigs, looking nervous.
Like all the best records, The Blue Album is possessed of a certain effortlessness, the kind that makes it very easy to listen to from start to finish with no need to press skip or stop. Out of the 10 tracks on offer, not a single one comes across as a dud. Every song does something different or interesting. Even the album’s biggest hit, Buddy Holly, is a Trojan horse containing lyrics about physical abuse and co-dependency. Plus the video (another Spike Jonze joint) is simply brilliant.
For a time, Cuomo was one of the most gifted songwriters of his generation and his craftsmanship shines across all 40 minutes of the album’s running time. The whole thing builds to a climax, musically and thematically, with the epic, metaphysical Only In Dreams, a seven-minute drone-jam of cosmic proportions. The album’s ending is as perfect as its beginning.
Weezer’s journey since The Blue Album hasn’t been the smoothest ride, for either band or fans. Their follow-up, 1996’s Pinkerton, was a brittle but magnificent confessional in which Cuomo laid his musical and lyrical soul bare. It sank without trace, and nearly sank Weezer in the process. Word of mouth kept them alive and they returned in 2001 with another self-titled, Ocasek-produced album, this time sporting a bright green cover. They played it a tad safer that time round, returning to the pop-rock that made their name. Since then, they’ve navigated a series of creative misfires but have returned this month with the appropriately titled Everything Will Be Alright In The End, an apparent return to form (it’s a telling sign that Rick Ocasek has been deployed once again as producer) according to those who have heard it. Whatever it turns out to be (or not be), there is still nothing that detracts from the majesty of their debut, which remains a perfect album in every way possible and still sounds fresh and vital to this very day.
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