Hooray for "Hurley"

Some of the songs on Weezer's "Hurley" have bizarre titles like "Trainwrecks

," "Where's My Sex?" and "All My Friends Are Insects," and many of the lyrics are even stranger than that. Among the fond recollections front man Rivers Cuomo points to on "Memories," there's "pissing in plastic cups before we went onstage" and "watching all the freaky Dutch kids vomit, then have sex." (Note that we're only one paragraph in and sex has already come up twice.)

Weezer's lyrics never did carry a lot of weight, or at least not as much as the music that went with it. You might argue that the lyrics are just a package for the music, in the sense that the music is a package for the band's spirit these guys come across as a bunch of geeks at the party who nobody paid attention to until it was their turn to play "Rock Band."

"Hurley" manages to go deeper than that, though, in spite of the fact that it's not above taking its name from Jorge Garcia's character on "Lost." (They even approached Garcia to appear on the cover.) "Unspoken," which starts off as an acoustic prayer about loathing and loss, builds into a flash fire of nihilistic grunge. For, as self-satisfied as the lyrics to "Trainwrecks" are, they're at right angles with the music, which is disillusioned and lonely even crashing one of Diddy's parties doesn't do much to lighten the mood.

There's a lot of ideas going on here, although that shouldn't suggest that "Hurley" is some kind of wild-goose chase. Still, it's exciting to hear the band playing with different sounds, even if they don't happen to be all that unconventional. The piano behind Cuomo's voice on "Run Away" only turns up during the first couple of bars, but it sets the tone for a song that doesn't sound quite like typical Weezer, a kind of requiem with romance at the center of its darkness.

What's funny is that with all the eccentricities here, the oddest moments turn out to be in the band's comfort zone, like the cover of Coldplay's "Viva la Vida." While it wouldn't be fair to say the band just phones it in, Weezer's version follows the Coldplay hit so closely that there isn't any reason to hear both, and all it does is make you wonder why anyone needed to cover it at all.

Maybe you need to master it to get bonus points in "Rock Band."

By: David GuzmanRead more music reviews at www.allmediany.com! Hooray for "Hurley"By: Rose

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