Weezer

Weezer used to be geek rock titans, singing charming love songs over mellow California-pop melodies. Their self-titled debut and sophomore album “Pinkerton” eschewed the oft gloom-ridden nature of early ’90s grunge and pop rock. In the years since, Weezer has released a series of disappointing albums that have driven the band more toward a radio pop direction. Their latest album, “Raditude” is the current apex of that progression. Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo ’99-’06 is notorious for his love of pop culture, referencing bands and pop icons from the Beatles to Green Day in his previous work. With “Raditude,” Weezer takes that love of everything pop one step further, enlisting major pop song writers such as Jermaine Dupri and Dr. Luke—the man behind Miley Cyrus’ chart-topping “Party in the U.S.A.”—to add to the band’s pop sensibilities, and unabashedly mimicking easily recognizable musical elements of the past decade’s well known radio hits.

While Weezer echoes the Top 40 on “Raditude,” they maintain the quirks they are best known for and integrate them into the one dimensional composition of the songs. The album’s openers, “(If You’re Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To” and “I’m You’re Daddy,” are the two most Weezer-esque songs on the album, hearkening back to the band’s early career. “I Want You To” is a power-pop gem that mimics the rhythmic and schematic elements of Fall Out Boy’s “Dance, Dance.” Weezer takes a simple melody, adds power chords, and makes the song their own by substituting basic drum interludes with rhythms created by acoustic guitars and adding in the cheesy vocal harmonies that drew fans to the group years ago.

“I’m You’re Daddy,” co-written by Dr. Luke and Cuomo, continues the power-pop theme of the album’s opener. Combining synthesizers and mechanical beats with the high energy guitar creates a more prevalent pop sound which nearly masks such ridiculous rhymes such as “I will egg the goomba / If you tire / Try my best to moonwalk / On a wire.”

“Raditude” also includes elements of mainstream pop to which Weezer has not even attempted to attain in the past, the results of which are largely unfortunate. One of the most anticipated songs on the album is “Can’t Stop Partying,” co-written by Jermaine Dupri and featuring a rap solo by one of the hip-hop world’s most recognizable figures, Lil’ Wayne. Weezer takes a shot at dance-pop, using the cliché R&B babes and booze formula: “I gotta have Patron / I gotta have the beat / I gotta have a lot of pretty girls around me.” Lil’ Wayne puts the absurdity of the song best in his interlude: “Okay bitch it’s Weezer and it’s Weezy / upside-down MTV.” Musically, “Can’t Stop Partying,” an adaptation from an acoustic demo off of Cuomo’s solo album, sounds like a Lady Gaga B-side. The song is filled with overdubbing, drum machine beats, and synthesizer-based melodies that sound only a few notes different from Lady Gaga’s early 2009 hit “Poker Face,” which Weezer covered in concert earlier this year.

Other songs like “Put Me Back Together” and “I Don’t Want to Let You Go” take on emotional themes in the way only the most saccharine of pop songs can. The band slows down the tempo and Cuomo sings with a whiney twinge to his voice, as if trying to emulate the style of the “Put Me Back Together” co-writers Tyson Ritter and Nick Wheeler of The All-American Rejects. “I Don’t Want to Let You Go” sounds uncannily similar to Hoobastank’s 2003 hit “The Reason,” relying on a simple piano melody and slowly heightening vocal theme to convince an unnamed woman not to leave the singer. On “Put me Back Together,” Cuomo sings “I’m alone in my room / I don’t know what to do,” an image so stereotypical in such music that it is made tolerable only by Weezer’s unapologetic evocation of it.

The over-the-top nature of “Raditude” undermines any attempts Weezer makes at deviating from their new-found direction. “Love is the Answer” is a failed attempt at semi-serious themes, embodied in lyrics such as “There will come a day / When we transcend our pain,” which seems out of place on an album of stories filled with teenage drama (cf. “The Girl Got Hot,” “In the Mall”).

The draw of “Raditude” is Weezer’s willingness not to hold back or make excuses for their drive toward predictable pop songs. Cuomo and crew present themselves with the challenge of taking their pop sensibilities even further, a challenge which will surely scare away any remaining members of the “Pinkerton” cult.