OK, Weezer – we need to talk. This sonority was not scheduled in our itinerary for 2021. We do not understand what is going on here: we feel a nostalgic breath of air on our faces. No, it is not revolutionary, different, whatever we want to call it. It is what the Weezer fans want to hear. And what the not so many fans, but who recognize the sound, want to hear. It’s rock, it’s pop, it’s imaginative. They have been here for a long time, but that time doesn’t seem to have passed them by. And this record throws us into this aspect: Weezer have grown, they’ve been playing in the last few years with what was ‘cool’ at the time and they’ve matured. The result? OK Human the fourteenth record of the American band.
OK, let’s do it.
On January 21st, on Twitter, the band wrote the album creation process. Citing the musicians:
“During the summer of COVID-19, we grabbed our masks, hit the studio & began to chip away at what is now known as OK Human. An album that was made by a handful of humans using only analog technologies (including a 38 piece orchestra) for all of you humans to consume. OK Human was made at a time when humans-playing-instruments was a thing of the past. All we could do is look back on ancient times when humans really mattered and when the dark tech-takeover fantasy didn’t exist. We used our instruments to connect to the 1960s and 1970s and, with the orchestra, back to the 18th and 19th centuries. We had no click track or loops or hi-tech sounds. Not even an electric guitar.”
The disc is relatively short (30 minutes) divided into twelve different songs.
We start with All My Favorite Songs, a nostalgic hymn in the first twenty seconds, Weezer, pure and hard, from then on. It reminded us of a classic of Portuguese music, José Cid – 20 years old. It was the first single of this new album, with a video clip that promises to put an entire generation that has grown up with the internet, the famous noise of the modem connecting to the whole world, the online meetings on Hi5, the discovery of new trends on MySpace, the rivalry Google vs Yahoo, Napster, Limewire, and others, that opened our eyes in record time, in nostalgia. Well, now it’s a little faster – and good.
In between, we have more songs that will become timeless, like Grapes of Wrath, Numbers, or Bird With a Broken Wing. They are melodies, mature, with a playful rock in the mix. At last. It’s never too much to remember that this record is Weezer after a lot of life on top, right?
To end this journey, we have La Brea Tar Pits. A captivating song, from the first to the last second.
Billy Cobb, one of the biggest Weezer fans we know and who, in 2019, released Zerwee, his idea for what should be a new record of the band – and which, we must say, is very, very good – considered it the fourth-best record of originals of the North American band. (Billy Cobb, also a creative, released in 2020 the second part of Zerwee (Zerwee Pt. 2)).
If the Island In The Sun still exists, then Weezer will certainly be there playing for us. And we, Humans, and they, Robots, will all certainly be in the same flow.
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Listen to OK Human: