album review: 'ok human' by weezer

…on some level, I’m surprised we didn’t get this album sooner.

I mean think about it: if you go on a base level of composition and instrumentation, Weezer has stuck to a pop rock / power-pop if we’re being generous formula for damn near as long as I’ve been alive, and while occasionally the guitars would get softer or heavier or scuzzier and the lyrics and compositions might venture into rabbit holes with rapidly diminishing returns - if you can’t tell, I’ve long stopped tolerating this band’s supply of bullshit - a Weezer album is generally pretty recognizable in terms of its sound. Now I have a lot of suspicions as to why it took this long to get here - I’ll likely wind up back in this territory, but it expands on thoughts I had when I reviewed the black album, that Weezer got way too famous way too early, hit a serious stumbling block of arrested development, and haven’t really seemed to grow much in terms of technical musicianship ever since - but I’m not about to complain that they’re here. Hell, there’s a part of me that thinks it took them way too damn long, especially given how scattered in quality their catalog is! And that’s not even touching on the bands who have tenures half as long as theirs but explored way more sounds and ideas with a lot more success.

That said, I also had concerns with this. Forget the fact that Weezer was calling this OK Human - which regardless of what you think about Weezer a Radiohead parallel is not a comparison they are likely to pay off, especially to that album - but this came once again as an album before the planned Van Weezer, which was looking to go hard rock. And even if I was open to the change in sound and the plan to record with an orchestra at Abbey Road, I couldn’t shake a weird sinking feeling when the teal album was pushed ahead of the black album, where instead of the promised project we got a diversion. Maybe Rivers Cuomo should stop making promises, but on another level, if you can’t tour the arena-ready songs promised on Van Weezer maybe this makes sense - and who knows, when bands usually bring in the strings that implies some aspirations towards growth and maturity. And maybe that sets expectations way too high, but what the hell - what did we get on OK Human?

You know, there’s a part of me that understands why there’s been excuses for this album - hell, I reckon there’s a lot of critics who are making excuses for this. Yes, it’s Weezer going baroque pop and it’s probably their most refined and “likable” work since Everything Will Be All Right In The End, and it shows Weezer at least trying to do something different and we have to give this band credit for trying, right? Whereas there’s a part of me that feels like we’ve given Weezer so many chances and if this is the most they can deliver, there are so many other acts that could have used the chances we’ve given here, for a band that has far more failures than successes, especially in recent years. If anything, it feels like OK Human was the moment where Weezer’s limitations are the most sharply defined they’ve ever been, and the pretensions of the presentation kind of made it worse.

And yes, this starts with Rivers Cuomo. The big advantage of power pop and punk and emo is that if you have a limited vocalist, the genre conventions give you an easy out - and art rock or baroque pop are not those genres. Almost immediately the juxtaposition is jarring: hey, Rivers Cuomo who has always been a mediocre singer with more power than technique, sounds glaringly out of place against the orchestra - and while that’s the point and we’ll get into that flimsy justification in a bit, if you can’t vibe with his nasal squawk opposite the cushion of strings and horns, it will immediately take you out of the experience. Simply on an aesthetic level he sounds out of his depth - men who typically sing in baroque pop either have a very willowy presentation like Perfume Genius or present more classically operatic, which you see a lot of symphonic metal and even when it translates to dirty vocals there is at least power there. Rivers Cuomo, on the other hand, sounds perpetually awkward - it reminds me, of all things, of the Tom Green movie Freddy Got Fingered, because there’s a scene where he and Rip Torn are having a fight in a fancy restaurant and constantly drawing attention to how cheap and thin the juxtaposition is, and it feels just as true here - even if the joke is honest, it’s stale. That’s not saying he’s not trying - he clearly wants to bring a bit more theatrical polish in a very mid-2000s vibe, but he’s no Brendon Urie or Josh Ramsay and it’s hard to ignore how limited of a singer he is, and it’s not like the backing vocals are giving him much help.

And this only gets more frustrating because for a lot of these songs: the orchestral backdrop sounds pretty good! The strings are lush and well-arranged and balance out the upright bass and woodwinds effectively, without letting the horns overpower the mix, and they add enough texture to a lead melody to highlight that Cuomo can still write a catchy hook if nothing else. There’s definitely a factor of diminishing returns with the orchestra - it’s common in baroque pop or symphonic metal that said orchestra is often best used to accentuate and amplify moments of climax rather than a constant presence - and I don’t think Weezer is getting the most of the arrangement here or doing anything all that innovative beyond just having an orchestra fill in for the riffs. But for once I don’t have to point to production as a major issue with a Weezer album - I was not always the biggest fan of how Jake Sinclair produced the white album, but he’s fine here, with the exception of some backing vocals on ‘:Aloo Gobi’ that sounded a bit more synthetic than they should, and you’d think the piano line would have way more focus on ‘Playing My Piano’. I also think it helps that the album is shorter - albums that use orchestras like this can run into a bad case of the bloat, and Weezer keeping this around a half hour appreciated… even if I do get the impression that the album can start running together by staying solely with this sound. That said, I do think the choppier cellos lead to some good flow between ‘Aloo Gobi’ and ‘Grapes of Wrath’, and on ‘Screens’, and there’s some nice sweetness to the arrangement of ‘Numbers’ that I didn’t mind, and ‘Bird With A Broken Wing’ had some nice bass interplay - probably the most likable song here. Hell, if there’s one climax that feels paid off well, it’d probably come on ‘Here Comes The Rain’, even if that’s not saying much overall. It’s very telling that the orchestral parts are the furthest thing from Weezer, and they’re easily the best parts of the album!

But hey, if Weezer is going to go baroque pop or towards chamber music, surely Rivers Cuomo has something to say, to have his writing match with the artistic pretensions of the sound… and then you get through the first song and you realize that’s not going to happen at all, because it’s Weezer and Rivers Cuomo isn’t going to change in his painfully basic lyrical structures or his thin grasp of metaphor and literature or the fact that in recent years the ironic deflection is long gone and he’s scrabbling for anything close to meaning. And if there’s an emotional core of this album, it is here, because thematically Cuomo is looking at the rest of the world and feeling adrift and left behind. It seems like recording this mid-pandemic had him face some hard existential questions, from questioning his old social scene and routines to find what once gave him pleasure to a relationship which he seems more insecure about than ever, all the way to questions about what his legacy will be, and with the final melodic motif of the album reflecting back to ‘The Sweater Song’, it’s kind of bleak in feeling that he’ll always be defined by his first work. And even if he might find escape in flights of fancy or playing his piano, the album finishes on images of oubliettes and tar pits - and for a brief moment, I get that existential alienation that was at the root of OK Computer, and I can see the parallel in idea and maybe in the awkwardness of the execution… if nothing else. And this is where Rivers Cuomo hits a point that feels almost too honest and in a really ugly way, because then you get the songs where he bemoans people chasing numbers and getting lost in screens and while it’s very easy to go ‘OK boomer’ here when he references BLACKPINK, Rivers Cuomo is more Gen X, and these themes were on the black album, and you can see how the old deflective nihilism isn’t really protecting him like it used to. And then it started snapping into place: how both this project and the planned Van Weezer are fundamentally nostalgic and backwards-looking projects in their intent even if they might be ‘evolutions’ for the band, the fear of being lost and ignored, where all the cynical memeing now feels all the more paltry in the face of a band terrified of shrinking relevance… and then I discovered that Rivers Cuomo is friends with Sam Harris, a modern philosopher-type who has been known to run in similar circles as Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin, and Ben Shapiro and in recent years has been exposed for long-running Islamophobia and rather undercooked philosophy… and Rivers Cuomo wrote ‘Here Comes The Rain’ as an ‘account of self-encouragement’ designed to cheer him up. Now I’m not projecting Harris’ beliefs onto Weezer - nor would I want half of the shit Rivers Cuomo has said projected on Sam Harris! - but it sadly makes way too much sense, in the same way Jordan Peterson meeting with Mumford & Sons did.

But here’s the other lingering thought that ran through this album: if you gave AJR a production budget, they would not sound that far removed from Weezer on OK Human. Think about it: unimpressive and nasal vocals that don’t match the theatrical production, an awkward whitebread stiffness that can’t pay off the attempts at bombast, lyrics that highlight the raging insecurity of their frontman and inability to grow up and face the passage of time, so they retreat into nostalgia and pop culture references. Hell, I don’t even need to point to Rivers Cuomo showing up on AJR’s best song ‘Sober Up’ as an example, look at ‘Grapes of Wrath’ on this album, where with its frequent references to Audible, how it is that far removed from when AJR went chasing for ad buys with ‘Beats By Dre’? The parallels are stark nowadays - Weezer certainly didn’t start there but twenty plus years later it’s hard to argue they aren’t in this ballpark, and while overall they might be better because of slightly sharper compositions and being able to afford the orchestra, can we really argue in good faith that Weezer hasn’t made as many bad taste decisions as AJR over the past twenty years… AJR just crammed in more of them in less time! But with OK Human… folks, yeah, it might not piss me off in the same way Weezer’s last three or four albums have, but we’ve all given Weezer so many chances, and just being ‘marginally better’ is not enough for me to stick around any more. So no, I didn’t really like this: 4/10, the fans are already going to worship it but if you’re not a fan I’m not recommending what might as well be an artistic detour. And folks… it’s been decades since the blue album and Pinkerton, and there are so many other bands… just move on?