Weezer Don’t Have to Fake It on The Gold Album: Review

If you told a casual fan that Weezer‘s 20th LP, widely dubbed The Gold Album, features a self-referential quiet-loud rocker intentionally structured as a “sequel” to 1994’s “Undone (The Sweater Song),” they might get more irritated than Leslie Jones in that Rivers Cuomo-centric SNL sketch. “C.E.O.”’s concept admittedly doesn’t sound great on paper: It opens with a twinkling guitar arpeggio and overdubbed background chatter, echoing that Blue Album classic, and our songwriter wastes no time getting meta: “Cranking out another ’90s jam/ Wish I could do something new,” he speak-sings in the intro. “But nobody wants to hear that/ They just want the classics/ Can’t blame ’em, really/ There’s something special about your early shit.” Find Weezer Tickets Here The end result isn’t instant classic Weezer on par with that predecessor. But it’s heartening that everything about “C.E.O.” feels real — both in the lyrics, as Cuomo channels an artist’s struggle to push forward and “give the people what they want,” and in how the band mirrors that angst with an unfussy clean-to-fuzz, amps-in-the-room arrangement. It’s keeper-tier Weezer not because it chases the ’90s, but because it evokes the earn...