Album Review: Weezer "The White Album"

3 out of 5

I'm caught between two extremes with Weezer's tenth studio album: on one hand I want to weep because there are songs here that would fit seamlessly into "The Blue Album" both in composition and sound, and there are some painfully modern pop songs that made me physically cringe.
For the first time in sixteen years I can comfortably say that out of ten tracks on a new Weezer album six of them are pretty damn good. Opener "California Kids" and single "King Of The World" aren't showstoppers, but they feel like songs that should've happened in 2001 instead of those on the notoriously emotionless return-from-hiatus "The Green Album". In fact, this album, along with all of its highs and lows feels like the natural follow up to "Pinkerton". Granted it's just under twenty years late.
Producer Jake Sinclair has worked some kind of magic on certain songs here, specifically "Summer Eliane And Drunk Dori", a song that apes the production and musical styles of the first two album so well that you could tell me it was a b-side from 1995 and I'd believe you, and "L.A Girlz", the first Weezer single in over a decade that sounds like an classic Alternative Rock song, not a modern Pop-Rock shart.
At the halfway point we get the mildly grimy cut "Do You Wanna Get High?", a song that willfully self-plagiarizes from "Pinkerton" track "Pink Triangle" (when you hear the bridge you'll know exactly what I mean) but serves as a nice reminder that Rivers Cuomo can still write something with any kind of lyrical weight.
Closer "Endless Bummer" serves as this albums "Only In Dreams" and hits it mark well, if not as anxious or noisey as its predecessor, it at least feels like a genuine grown up counterpart to it.
But alas, not all is great here, most notably in "Wind In Our Sails" and "Thank God For Girls" both of which have an almost hip-hop vibe to them that is most definitely stolen directly from Emo-pop-hop duo Twenty One Pilots. "Wind" is totally disposable and only serves to remind listeners of all the follies Weezer have had over the last six or seven albums (depending on how you feel about 2014's polarizing "Everything Will Be Alright In The End") and "Girls" is actually not all that bad with a lively beat and bitter, sarcastic lyrics like, "And when you come home she will be there waiting for you with a fire in her eyes and a big fat cannoli to shove in your mouth", but suffers from Cuomo's obsessive need to stay trendy and appear young.
Which brings me to the one thing that weighs this album down for me and where I hope Weezer goes from here: Weezer's music is perpetually stuck in a juvenile teenage Neverland and I (along with other fans) desperately want to see them mature. This album is easily the best they've made since initially splitting up in 1997 but the themes here are all retreads: youth, summer, girls etc etc, and would resonate more with me if I was still a teenager, but I'm not and neither are the guys in Weezer, which leaves me begging the question: in another ten years are they still going to be writing these same songs?
I'd highly recommended certain cuts on this album, and with the sun and summer just around the corner having some solid Weezer jams to welcome them with is exciting, but the stakes are even higher now for Weezer and I hope the next album leaves me as thrilled as this one has. Until then I'll put "Summer Elaine and Drunk Dori" on repeat because holy hell this song is fucking great.