It’s has been four years since ‘Hurley’ and did you feel the need for a new Weezer song? Whether you needed or not ‘Back to the Shack’ is there, and it will please Weezer typical fans. Just listen to this song with Cuomo’s signature delivery followed by guitars arriving by waves, there’s also your usual sing-along power chord chorus, and even a change of tempo a bit later on, it becomes poppier when everything, guitars, drums and voices boom together. I have always found Weezer’s music being the opposite of subtle and this song is not going to change my opinion about it.
Everybody seems to agree on the fact that this new album, entitled ‘Everything Will Be Alright in the End’, marks the return to some old school Weezer, Cuomo even sings ‘Kick in the door, more hardcore / Rocking out like it’s ’94’… as a matter of fact, and the album is even produced by The Cars’ Ric Ocasek, who already produced Weezer’s 1994 Blue Album and 2001’s Green Album. Drummer Pat Wilson has described the album’s sound as a blend of the band’s first two albums: ‘If you took the ‘Pinkerton’ band and then play all the other records – that’s what we sound like now. Bombastic, loose, kind of booming. This record sounds like it’s going to have the tight structure of ‘Blue Album‘ with a little bit more abandon like ‘Pinkerton’.’
Four years is a long time, and the band also explained that Cuomo wrote the new songs at a pace slower than usual, ‘giving the songs … time to gradually grow into their final forms’, organizing them ‘thematically around three groups of songs’ and utilizing the ‘sound from the band’s earliest days to tell new stories in 2014.’
Furthermore, according to Fuse TV, Weezer did not drop the song on Youtube, Twitter or Facebook as many other bands do, ‘Back to the Shack’ was simply broadcast over national radio before it was posted on the Internet. Did you say old school?
The song is the first single off ‘Everything Will Be Alright in the End’ (out September 30th on Republic Records) and you may hear more from this new album if you attend next month’s Made in America festival at Grand Park in downtown L.A. Personally, I won’t, and I find this cover art – this half-yeti, half-where-the-wild-things-are monster – quite ugly… or juvenile like the sound of the song?
