Weezer have taken a lot of flak in recent years.
In 2010, a Washington man started an online campaign to raise $10,000,000 with the intention of offering the money to Weezer in exchange for the band’s retirement. By his estimations, all that would take was $12 from everyone who bought Pinkerton.
So let’s talk about Pinkerton. With their previous record, The Blue Album, Weezer had risen out of the ashes of grunge like a bespectacled phoenix that had a hard time talking to women and didn’t know how to dance.
By the time Pinkerton was released in 1997, Weezer were four incredible nerds-cum-musicians who’d had a taste of what rock ‘n roll stardom was like, and it filtered through into their song-writing process.
Compared to its predecessor, Pinkerton was a lot less frivolous and lot more frustrated. Weezer were no longer in the comfort zone of their garage. They were like kids who’d had their toys taken away – and Pinkerton ended up being one of the best tantrums ever recorded.
We’ve ranked our five favourite tracks from the album:
5) Across The Sea
No band would get away with writing Across The Sea nowadays. The song is about Rivers’ 18-year old Japanese pen-pal upon whom he has developed a crush. The drum beat pounds, the guitars are fuzzier than a Morbeg orgy and the lyrics are downright weird but Weezer’s sheer inability to write a melody that’s impossible to forget is in full-flow.
The chorus is pop-punk at its finest and the song is capped off by one a guitar solo that’ll make you wish mainstream audiences still had the patience for guitar solos.
4) Tired Of Sex
The album opens with lead singer Rivers Cuomo lamenting that he is having sex with simply too many women (we’ve all been there). The song is a darker, more tense affair than anything that featured on The Blue Album – tension that all gets released when Cuomo howls the second chorus, listing the names of women he’s slept with this week.
We don’t want to harp on too much about guitar solos but Tired Of Sex had one that wouldn’t have been out of place and a KISS record and, frankly, Barenaked Ladies and Counting Crows never brought that to the table.
3) No Other One
Where The Blue Album was full of wholesome, Buddy Holly-esque romance about “girls who laugh for no-one else”, shit got realer on Pinkerton. No Other One is a blurry ode to a drug-taking, tattooed lady of Rivers’ fancy whom he refuses to leave because he doesn’t want to be alone (his words, not mine).
The production values on the track leave it very rough around the edges, which perhaps perfectly aligns with Rivers’ clearly more fragile, more dependent and more vulnerable attitude towards romance since writing Weezer’s naive, innocent debut album three years prior.
2) El Scorcho
If Buddy Holly made Weezer the kings of the nerdy love song, El Scorcho made them gods. The half-spoken verses over a plucked riff makes for wonderfully awkward listening before the band launches into a chorus so familiar and catchy that it could be a nursery rhyme.
1) Pink Triangle
Pinkerton is something like a collection of all the romantic misfortunes that can possibly befall a boy. Pink Triangle is the story of a young man who unknowingly falls in love with a lesbian. It has a gentle opening riff that lures in the listener before the rhythm section crashes through the wall and makes its presence known.
After that opening, it is once again all about Rivers’ knack for telling a story in the funniest, most anti-charming way possible. These guys were nerds before being a nerd was cool and Pinkerton might just be responsible for that evolution.
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