After 2005's awful "Make Believe," Weezer's sixth album was meant to reaffirm their greatness. But you can forget that, as what fans have dubbed "The Red Album" (because of the color of its sleeve) is the unforgiving sound of an echo rattling through the empty shell of a band you once loved.
Weezer's first two albums, "Weezer" (1994; known as "The Blue Album") and "Pinkerton" (1996) were indie classics, but after "Pinkerton" sold poorly, mastermind Rivers Cuomo pulled the plug and went back to study at Harvard. Japan's Fuji Rock Festival cheekily coaxed them out of retirement in 2000 with a big wad of cash, setting the ball rolling for a hugely successful comeback that almost made them the greatest indie-pop band on the planet. Only "almost," however, as somewhere along the line Weezer lost their wheeze. The riffs remained but the lyrical insights were left in a forgotten stash under Cuomo's bed back at college.
Here, "Troublemaker" is the depressing sound of a middle-aged man trying to act like a hip teenager, while "The Greatest Man that Ever Lived" postures at progressive grandiosity but fails as meandering nonsense. Single "Pork and Beans" lifts the mood for a moment with its cheery thump, but the cliched rhyming of "pain/name/rain" on "Thought I Knew" is simply inexcusable. Sadly, "The Red Album" is Weezer's "Ozymandias" moment — proof that even the great shall fall.