Album review: Weezer – Death To False Metal
Weezer have had their ups and downs over the years. Sometimes producing truly great albums like ‘Pinkerton’ to occasionally missing the target with albums like ‘Make Believe’, so an album of tracks that never made the final cut could go either way. ‘Death To False Metal’ is a collection of songs recorded in 1998, in between ‘Pinkerton’ and ‘The Green Album’ and shortly before the band disbanded for a period when Rivers Cuomo was suffering from depression.
Consisting of ten tracks, ‘Death to False Metal’ starts off well, rocking out with ‘Turning Up The Radio’ (let the music play/let the good times roll/we don’t care what you say/we’re turning up the radio),‘I don’t Want Your Loving’ and ‘Blowin’ My Stack’ – all classic Weezer. But this is where things take a bit of a dive. ‘Losing My Mind’ is a not particularly good slow song with embarrassingly simplistic lyrics; ‘I’m losing my mind/I’m going insane/I’m watching my life/go down the drain’. The pace and quality pick up briefly with ‘Everyone’ but ‘I’m A Robot’, which quite frankly could have been written by a 10 year old, brings the quality levels crashing back down again. And this is how the rest of the album plays out; the entire 18 years of Weezer’s output summed up in 10 tracks over 32 minutes. There is one thing you can be sure of with Rivers Cuomo, he has moments of genius and he can be excruciatingly poor on occasion but he’s never mediocre. Special mention should be given to their cover of Toni Braxton’s ‘Un-Break My Heart’, I love it but it’s not very respectful to the original, so any Toni Braxton fans out there should steer clear!
Mark Cousens
Buy Weezer CDs from hmv
No related posts.
