Review Summary: It makes me see red
Here's one for all you experimental fans out there! I for one find experiments about hit or miss throughout their career. For every good one there's this one (not to mention prog and it's GODAWFUL vocals. Where the vocals recorded by a xylophone?) They have about as many good albums as they do bad ones but Red Album sits around the middle but more toward the bottom. How it is revered as a classic album I'll never know, it's only like the six best Weezer album! But if you can put that presumption aside, it's actually pretty good, you might find. It is here where Weezer really started to find their footing as a band. Where Blue Aklbum was a band that didn't know how to do anything, Pinkerton was a band that used their inexperience to their advantage, and this one has a band that is finally starting to figure out what they're doing.
This is clearly shown with the first track Troublemaker. I loved this song on Rock Band and I love it here too, it's just a great opening track and the acoustic intro contrasts with the rapping later on, perfectly. My problem comes in with the second track called Greatest Man that Ever Lived. It's too long; like way too long. And that's a common theme with the album, the songs are all wearing out their welcome. It's not that the songs are bad they just last way longer than they should, and get too repetitive. I think if you cut out all the repetition then you'd have an album damn worthy of being labeled as a classic, but there's too much fat on this album. Maybe the same is true for other albums but this one bothers me.
Plus a couple of the songs are too fillery for my tastes. While the first half of the album is pretty good, it falters in the second half with duds like Automatic and Cold Dark World. Filler songs like this makes a long album feel even longer. And why isn't Heart Songs the finally? It has all the making of an epic closer but for some reason Angel and the One is tacked onto the end instead. It's the little things like this which keep Red album from truly being the classic that Weezer fans seems to think it is. If you cut out some repetitiveness and rearranged the songs to make it flow better, it'd be an easy 4, but as it sits here and now, it's a pretty middle of the road album.
