Pinkerton Deluxe Makes Me Sad

So Weezer came out with a deluxe version of their album Pinkerton this week.  It featured a bunch of live recordings of the original songs and some b-sides that were never given a wide release.

Let me just first say that Pinkerton is awesome and nearly every single extra song on this rerelease is equally so, but part of me wishes the whole thing never happened.

First of all (and semi-unrelated) most of the b-sides I have on some burned disc somewhere back from the days when I would spend 3 hours everyday downloading songs off of audiogalaxy so my need to actually purchase this from Itunes is immediately diminished but I haven't seen that disc in about 6 years and I'm not poor so I don't mind buying the occasional track off Itunes.  But $16.00 is a little expensive.

One, about 99.9% of anyone interested in buying this already owns the original album so that's 10 songs they don't need to pay for right out the gate.  Now, that still leaves 26 songs, which is a lot except that half of them are live recordings of the original songs, El Scorcho appears on the album 4 times in different incarnations.  I love El Scorcho but I don't want to pay for it 4 times.  Whatever, this is really a minor issue, I'm not gonna buy the whole album anyway.  But still.

The real thing that bums me out about this sort-of-new album is how good it is.

I've heard almost all of these b-sides before, but its been a while for a lot of them and hearing them now is like hearing them for the first time again.  The initial euphoria brought on by the pure force behind them quickly gives way to the realization that these songs are so much better than nearly every song Weezer has come out with in the last 8 years.

If any one of these songs had been a new song on one of their more recent albums it immediately would have been every fans' favorite song.  And this is coming from someone who actually likes a lot of what Weezer has done on their last 4 albums (Raditude mostly sucked though).  It's been good.  But it hasn't been nearly this good.

There was a time when Cuomo thought about things other than being cool and famous.

Maybe some of it is nostalgia, but Weezer songs just don't have the same kind of heart these songs had.  They definitely don't have the same intensity.  Songs from the days of Pinkerton were honest and insane, when Rivers gives out a guttural scream on Tired of Sex you know he isn't thinking about how many people are going to think he's cool, or if he is, I sure as hell can't tell.  Every song has a feeling to it that it could halt at any moment because Rivers just couldn't take it anymore and smashed his guitar.

I know that Weezer has evolved and that's a good thing.  You can't come out with the same album over and over and over (but ACDC did and it worked pretty well for them).  But I reaaaally liked that Weezer, and they ain't ever comin' back.