Rivers Cuomo began plotting
Weezer's return to hard rock long before the October 2020 passing of
Eddie Van Halen, but once the guitarist left this world, Cuomo decided to dub the group's heavy 2021 record
Van Weezer. The title is an affectionate tribute to an early musical hero and also some truth in advertising: The album is indeed filled with the kind of oversized riffs and melodies that characterized
Van Halen's reign in the early 1980s. Like all great
Van Halen albums,
Van Weezer weighs in at a swift 31 minutes, spending no longer than necessary to drive home the hooks and guitar solos, but that's where the easy comparisons end.
Weezer doesn't use the early
Van Halen albums as a blueprint so much as they treat the band as their spirit animal, attempting to infuse
Weezer's power pop with a dose of reckless abandon.
Rivers smartly doesn't attempt to mimic the gonzo showmanship of
David Lee Roth; he sticks to his geeky persona, an image that is enhanced, not contradicted, by the overdriven roar of the amplifiers. It's not so much that there's tension between Cuomo's plain-spoken vocals and the mountains of guitars, but that the noise delivers a transcendence his singing yearns to achieve. It also helps that this neo-nostalgia project helps focus Cuomo's songwriting. Working with a rotating cast of collaborators, he remains focused on big hooks, melody, and clever turns of phrases that never are anchored to the past even when they play upon memories. It's a trick that
Van Weezer pulls off as a whole: any of its retro origins are washed away by big, dumb sounds that keep the record grounded in the eternal now, an aesthetic choice that also helps the album be a rousing good time. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine