Weezer - Everything Will Be Alright In The End

To say a band can release a comeback record without having yet broken up or gone on a recent hiatus seems unusual, but the state of Weezer’s condition called for an album that could make up for a decade’s worth of flops, duds, and highly suspicious creative decisions. Now here we are with Everything Will Be Alright In The End, a reprisal of Weezer’s best material and an impressive collection of songs recalling an era Weezer once conquered.

The album starts with an extended intro featuring a chugging guitar build-up before moving into a classic Weezer chorus, lyrically ridiculous, immediately memorable. On the second track, Cuomo writes an apology letter to Weezer fans:

Sorry guys, I didn’t realise that I needed you so much, I thought I needed a new audience, I forgot that disco sucks.

The songs are hardly high-minded or pretentious, but they’re not supposed to be. EWBAITE is about what Weezer excel at – guitar pop, hooks, honest lyrics, and the occasional flourish which never overtakes the greater thing at stake: the deliverance of good pop.

On the other side, the album can be fatiguing. Every song seems to be crafted as a potential radio-hit and the album provides little room to breathe. Songs like I’ve Had It Up To Here’ and Go Away (featuring Best Coasts’ Bethany Cosentino) do seem like filler; they’re inferior to other tracks on the album that do the exact same thing and they lack their own special merit. There is little-to-no deviation from loud, fuzzy guitars – even Cleopatra, which begins as an acoustic song, segues into another simplistic pop rock affair once it reaches its chorus.

The standout track is The British Are Coming which crams everything Weezer have into a four minute song. It begins with off-kilter acoustic guitar, runs into a relatively pleasant verse, and then climaxes in classic Weezer style – that is, with the kind of effusion that reminds us that, yes, this is the band that wrote Buddy Holly, and they can still (kind of) do it.

The final three tracks form a kind of trilogy and are numbered I, II, and III accordingly. They offer some breathing room with longer instrumental sections and a greater degree of diversion from normality than we’re used to in this album, but they stick near enough to the Weezer formula to round the album off coherently. The final track is named Return To Ithaka, a fitting reference to Homer’s Odyssey. Like Odysseus, Weezer had been lost for the best part of ten years, presumed dead. Now they’re back, and though it’s not a perfect return, it’s better than many would have ever believed. Everything Will be Alright In The End – a theory Weezer may have just confirmed.