You take your car to work, I’ll take my board. And when you’re out of fuel, I’m still afloat. If you thought last week’s Jack Johnson review was tropical and laid back (and is still $5, by the way), this has a very similar vibe. Sure, it has absolutely nothing to do with the oceans of Hawaii or even acoustic rock – but once you get a couple times through this album, you’ll find yourself happier and more relaxed. And isn’t that what music should be?
Weezer is a Los Angeles band that formed back in 1992. Since their inception, they’ve released nine albums (the ninth coming next month), all of which have varied immensely in style. You might get one that’s really punk rock-ish, the next one will be really poppy and the next might leave you scratching your head about what you just heard. That’s part of the charm. Maybe that’s why they’ve sold over 20 million albums worldwide. They’re one of the best bands you probably don’t know too much about.
When I think of Weezer, I think about their debut album, The Blue Album. Personally, this was one of the first handful of CDs I ever owned. It came out when I was just 9 years old, and I’ve been consistently jamming out to it since. It is their best-selling album, at nearly 7 million sold. And in terms of style, you might hear it called “alt rock” (which was really just because of the big alternative revolution at the time), but since we’ve expanded on that type of music over the years, you’ll probably now hear it called emo rock or maybe power pop. For me, I would label this simply as feel-good, sing-along music. The lyrics are catchy and the beats are contagious. It simply makes you want to play it in the car and drive to Mexico smiling the whole way down. Or in a more relatable context, you can throw it on your headphones at work and melt the hours away.
With it being a high selling album, you’ve probably heard a couple of the singles from it. ‘Buddy Holly’ is by far the most recognized track, with a very distinct music video, parodying the TV show ‘Happy Days’ – and was even featured on your Windows 95 machine as the test video for media player. The video summarizes the fun vibe this album puts out. VH1 even labeled it as the 59th greatest song of all time. ALL TIME! That’s some high praise. Other major singles were ‘Undone – The Sweater Song’, and ‘Say It Ain’t So’; both great songs in their own right.
I think those three singles made this album so popular, but in my opinion, they’re not even the best songs on it, are what makes it so great. You can plop it in the CD player expecting to hear the three hits, but then get sucked in from start to finish. That’s rare in music these days. We live in an iTunes buy-the-single world. There simply isn’t a bad song on this album. All the accolades and acclaim are there—it’s been called one greatest albums of all time, best debut albums of all time, even a CD to own before you die.
I know Cheap Tunes Tuesday typically tells you about albums that are $5 dollars through Amazon. But today, I’m sad to report you’ve read through this entire post and I can’t tell you to go buy it for $5 bucks. You can’t do it. But I can happily report to you, this album is only $3.99 on Amazon! I can’t believe I just typed that. You can buy a digital copy of Weezer’s best-selling album to date for under $4 bucks. If that’s not a great deal, I seriously have no idea what a deal is.
Top 3 Tracks:
1) Only In Dreams
2) Say It Ain’t So
3) In The Garage
[…] real promotion for it—they wanted to see what sales could be generated by word-of-mouth alone. The Blue Album has sold nearly 7 million copies to date, so I’d say the strategy worked just fine. Fourteen […]