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Last May you could still get away with denial of reality.

Weezer, the American indie über-band that has grown too big for student rock, released the single "Hero" as a foretaste of their new album.

It should be called “Van Weezer”: guitar counter-bars, distortion orgies, fully turned up, deliberately somewhat prepotential stadium rock, just like in the innocently masculine eighties.

But the album was postponed due to the pandemic.

Instead, woodwinds, glockenspiel, cello - and Rivers Cuomo sings like a houseplant: “All my favorite songs are slow and sad.” This, too, is as little bought from this gifted ironist as the teeth-on-fingerboard pose before.

Weezers are masters of mimicry, their 2019 cover album with deceptively real versions of Toto, Aha or Tears For Fears is awesome.

When stadium rock was still popular: Weezer 2019

Source: picture alliance / NurPhoto

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For the hit chamber pop of the new album “OK Human” - the title a homage to Radiohead's epoch album “OK Computer” from 1997 - they did without guitars and other devil stuff and asked an orchestra into the studio.

The result are strings with drums and nostalgic lyrics that castigate the all-encompassing quantification ("Numbers") or sing about the joys of listening to excessive audio books ("Grapes of Wrath").

Winston Smith, the main character from Orwell's "1984", can be assured of the full support of the lyrical self, "'Cause battling Big Brother feels more meaningful than binging zombie hordes".

That even "Moby Dick" and "Mrs.

Dalloway “are only higher forms of escapism at the end of the lockdown day, is one of those typical barbs that Weezer builds into the most drinkable chorus.

With their "White" and most recently the "Black Album" they have long since emerged from the creative drought of their middle period.

Escape from the world was a central motif even earlier, most recently in the song "High as a Kite".

The pop-historical masquerade, which Weezer has mastered virtuously, does not stop at the gesture of the authentic, which not only characterizes hymn-like pigskin, but also elitist art pop - the little swipe at Radiohead and Thom Yorke's suffering from the world is fully intended.

On "OK Human", Rivers Cuomo plays the role of the highly sensitive machine attacker and analogue fetishist so convincingly that you almost feel like he is organic.

This text is from WELT AM SONNTAG.

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Source: Welt am Sonntag