Weezer: self-titled (red album) [GEFFEN]

Why you'll love it

This reissue comes in gatefold packaging. Rick Rubin produced much of the album, and every member of the band takes a lead vocal somewhere on it.

This edition

• Gatefold jacket

About the album

Weezer named three albums after themselves and let the cover colours sort out the confusion. The Red Album is the one with Rivers Cuomo in a cowboy hat, and it's the loosest, most playful of the lot, made with Rick Rubin and the band themselves at the desk.

"Troublemaker" kicks off with a grin, "Pork And Beans" pairs a huge riff with one of the decade's best-loved videos, starring a cast of YouTube's earliest stars, and "The Greatest Man That Ever Lived (Variations On A Shaker Hymn)" builds on the Shaker hymn Simple Gifts and changes style every few bars. Then the mic gets passed around: Brian Bell sings "Thought I Knew," Scott Shriner takes "Cold Dark World" and Pat Wilson fronts "Automatic."

It was the band's sixth album, arriving 14 years after their debut. "Heart Songs" is Cuomo's sweet roll call of the records that shaped him, and "The Angel And The One" closes things on a grand, sweeping note. Any band where the drummer gets a lead vocal is a band confident in its democracy, or at least in its drummer.

Also at Kops: more Weezer on vinyl · browse Alternative

Tracklist

Listen

On Geffen, a reissue of the 2008 album.