Coming on the heels of a creative outburst during the Covid pandemic, and the release of two full albums to critical success in 2021 (OK Human & Van Weezer), the power pop princes are trying another ambitious set of releases. The theme is seasons. Each new season for 2022-23 we will get a new EP. The first release was seven songs on SZNZ: Spring that came out on March 20. An eighth song, "Across the Meadow" is on the vinyl version. Knowing the theme, I predicted correctly that this would be a sugary sweet pop record. Fortunately, there is some distorted guitar that was absent on OK Human. The song writing is not quite as bad as the flop that was Pacific Daydream. Overall, I'm not impressed though. From the cringy lyrics of "Opening Night" to the near voice cracking falsetto in "Angels on Vacation," this is not their best work. I'm also not usually critical of mixes, but this one seems to have vocals very forward, and everything else falling back with drums being really thin sounding throughout. Ironically, a song called "The Sound of Drums" doesn't even feature the instrument.
The highlight is definitely the single, "A Little Bit of Love." You can see the lyric video with some animations here. The simple romanticism of "Garden of Eden" is cute too, if you are in the mood for that kind of thing. I rate Spring 3/5 stars. If you are a fan of Weezer's poppier stuff, you likely would enjoy this EP. Rivers said, “Spring is kind of like happy chill . . . and then we move through to dance rock, like a Strokes-style album for the fall.” That sounds more up my alley so I'll look forward to the September release. Winter is likely to be a slower, more acoustic sad record. Summer is a toss up. If it sounds more like "Island in the Sun" and "LA Girls" than "Feels Like Summer" we will be in good shape.
Weezer has just celebrated their 30th year as a band in February, and the 30th anniversary of their first show one day before SZNS came out! The latter two thirds has been with a consistent lineup. At least twice during that run it looked like Rivers didn't want to continue the band. Now they are showing no signs of slowing down and he said on their social media they are "nowhere near the end of our story." While it has been a bit of a roller coaster in terms of musical style since Scott joined, I'm here for the ride.
