Weezer
Maladroit

THE REVIEW

Take any ordinary evening, whether summer or winter, you're in your car, confused and bored, at the mercy of frantic races and the exhausting traffic. The lights and flickering signs of the places outside are on; it's a sign that there is life outside your car while you're in there, closed off and forced to follow the order of the row of cars. So you take an Mp3 and start listening to Maladroit: afterwards, you won't be able to not say something about what you just listened to.

Maladroit is perhaps the least appreciated album by Weezer: a flop at the time of its release (it was 2002), no one talked about it anymore after that.

But let's start from the beginning of the tracklist. "American Gigolo" is the classic track that immediately hits you on the first listen. Strong guitars, well-tuned harmonies, a barrage of YEAH, and Rivers Cuomo's voice, very different from the deep one in the Green Album. The first course is served.

What follows are "Dope Nose" and "Keep Fishin'", the two singles released with videos on MTV: the first follows the instrumental style of "American Gigolo", while the second follows it only in the structure (namely: 1st verse - chorus - 2nd verse - chorus - tempo change with a sped-up drum - interlude solo - chorus - tempo change, etc. etc.). "Take Control" closes the first hard (rock) part and certainly the most commercially viable section of the album, then giving way to a kind of various musical experiments.

"Death and Destruction" and "Slob" are less energetic pieces and not lacking in various instrumental distortions and deceptive crescendos.

"Burndt Jamb" reminds us in some ways of "Island in the Sun" and, with the same serene guitars, it gives us the impression of being on a lost southern island (try reflecting, maybe you've already heard it somewhere, in an ad...).

The ensemble continues with "Space Rock", a kind of darker rock with an almost entirely falsetto-sung beginning, and right afterward "Slave" where we find once again the verse "in your arms" already present in some song from the green album.

The real surprises are (in my fully personal opinion) "Fall Together", a purely rock ballad, and "Possibilities", which contains a pretty clever interlude riff in a Green Day-style.

Someone has also written that track no. 12, "Love Explosion", is full of trivial solos: however, it too is highly successful and capable of grabbing and intriguing everyone from the first listen.

The melodic "December" closes the menu, a piece that appears after "Slob" as the longest of all.

In short, it must be said that this album is all to be listened to because it never follows the same style and changes each time, covering almost all the genres of rock. The only flaw of the album is the too short duration of the songs, which do not exceed 3 minutes. But for the rest, I give a good score to Maladroit, despite the consistently negative judgments that it has received.