The last great Weezer rarity

Anyone remember his sticker guitar? Photo by Flickr’s rocknroll_guitar

Every music connoisseur has some album, discovered at an opportune moment, that hit like a meteor and left a crater. It’s not necessarily a Great Record, but it displays its flaws without shame, and effects us accordingly. For a lot of us, that was Pinkerton.

We’ve all long since grown out of our embarrassing obsession with the band that recorded Pinkerton – commensurate with said band’s precipitously diminishing returns. Though we still enjoy the album, we now see it in light of all its shortcomings and it gets only the very occasional spin. (Needless to say, we’ve long since left the Weezer message boards for Hipinion or ILM.)

But now and then, in one or another way, we get to relive some small taste of the bittersweetness of our discovery of the Pink Album. Today, it’s “Superfriend,” a pre-Pinkerton demo that will appear on the forthcoming (and unfortunately-titled) Alone. The melody is so tender, the lyrics so dumbly genuine – “What the hell am I doing,” Rivers asks you, “Thinking with my willy?” – and all of it aches over cardboard drums and the band’s best fuzzed-out Malkmus-picking. The whole unfinished sound, novel and familiar, puts you right back on the floor of your ninth-grade bedroom, all tangled headphones, Advil, and impossibly unrequited love.

Weezer – “Superfriend”: stream

(Alone is due Dec. 18 on Geffen)

Previously: The Canon, Examined: Weezer – Pinkerton

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