Though it features a seemingly-intimidating 18 tracks, the whole affair clocks in at 46 minutes, largely due to short songs (a wiry and somewhat inexplicable cover of Ice Cube’s “The Bomb”) and interludes (the totally-pointless dialogue snippet “I Wish I Had an Axe Guitar” and the vocals-only experiment “Ooh”). Though low-fi MP3s did manage to find their way online, it isn’t until now (the end of 2007) that we finally get the first official release of some of those songs… as well as a boatload of solo recordings from Rivers’ big ol’ vault of unreleased material.Īlone: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo is exactly what it sounds like: an album of one-offs, hard-to-finds, and unreleased material that dates all the way back to 1984 (though a majority of the material comes from his active 1993-5 period). It wouldn’t be long before fans began scouring for unreleased material from that era, most notably in the form of demos for Songs from the Black Hole: a space-voyage rock-opera which was intended as the initial follow-up to The Blue Album. Yet Cuomo never thought of Pinkerton as a one-off: he did nothing short of disowning it entirely after its release. Cuomo never once attempted to re-create the album, and no one can criticize him for not wanting to repeat the past. The latter - a sleeper album if there ever was one - was one of rock’s most abrasive-yet-absorbing listens, as Cuomo had inadvertently crafted an album of exposed-nerve confessions that spoke to a whole generation of horn-rimmed rock fans. Quite simply, despite some absolutely stellar singles (“Island in the Sun”, “Dope Nose”, and “Perfect Situation” chief among them), Weezer’s post-millennial output wasn’t holding a candle to the one-two masterpiece punch that Weezer broke out of the gate with: the pitch-perfect power pop of their eponymous ’94 debut and the raw, harrowing (and even funny) introspection of 1996’s Pinkerton. Yet an increasingly Cuomo-centric way of life wasn’t the only problem that the ’00 Weezer was facing. Though Cuomo was always the focal point of Weezer from the get-go, few people knew that the band had morphed into a power-pop dictatorship, which suddenly brought clarity to things like former guitarist Matt Sharp’s mysterious 1998 departure from the platinum guitar heroes.
In the article ( excerpted here), frontman Rivers Cuomo - fresh on his Rick Rubin-inspired meditation binge - comes across as a conceded as insular man, totally believing that he wasn’t just writing pop songs, but making unmistakable “art” all while the rest of the band completely submitted to Cuomo’s every melodic whim, even going as far as to grant Cuomo “veto power” in the recording process. In 2005, Weezer released their critically maligned fifth album, Make Believe, but what ultimately proved to be more lasting than the songs it contained was, instead, a Rolling Stone article that preempted the release.