The Daily Spin, August 27
Weezer | Maladroit
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023.
Each album will be given a rating on a scale from 0 to 10. You can look at the entire set here. Additionally, you can check out a list of my favorite song from each album right here.
Album: Maladroit (2002)
Artist: Weezer
Link:
On the heels of two fantastic albums, it’s not unreasonable to assume that Maladroit would have been significantly better.
One of the things I have made clear more than once before is that a truly impressive feat, to me, is to put together three strong albums in succession. There’s a very small subset of artists that, to me, have accomplished that, and it’s usually because by album three their styles have morphed enough that it just doesn’t hit the same way, or in the case of Weezer, the story just got old.
I’m left feeling like Maladroit is the culmination of eight years of work, in the sense that after so long, it’s hard to innovate when boxed into a certain style of work - and instead of choosing to innovate, they chose to roll over and keep things as they were. It’s classically solid work, Rivers Cuomo remaining deeply talented through it all, but at the end of the day, it’s not exciting, it’s not outstanding, and given where we were coming from I don’t think I’m being unreasonable in saying that I hoped for better.
Rating: 7.2/10
Best Tracks: Slob; Keep Fishin’
Worst Tracks: Burndt Jamb; Space Rock