If Weezer is a playground, then the happiest kid in the sandbox is singer, guitarist, and chief songwriter Rivers Cuomo. Raditude, the seventh album, shows a group that sounds cheerful and confident at the same time. About half of Raditude ties in with the band's oldest work: a clever mix of indie, pop and punk rock. The other figures of speech that Cuomo chooses have been of varying success. For
… the infectious The Girl Got Hot, the group puts on a pounding battery of glam rock drums and the psychedelic Love Is The Answer features a sitar and Indian singer. Lil Wayne raps in Can't Stop Partying, but the smooth R&B sounds strange to Weezer. And a line of text like 'I only want weed and some girls around me' must be interpreted as ironic. No, in their forties singing the life of their twenties, that pinches. But for all age-old motocross cycling men, Raditude is a nice license to let it all hang out, as Weezer so beautifully calls it. (PdK)more
