There’s A Battle On The Dancefloor

Scenario Rock “Skitzo Dancer (Justice Remix)” – “Give me something to dance to, and please, no techno.” Well, at least he just comes out and says it. It’s not a crime to want to dance to music with pop hooks and vocals and lyrics that get you in the mood for fun. This isn’t about hating on techno, and it’s not some kind of rockist manifesto. Having preferences is not the same thing as aesthetic fascism unless you err on the side of narrow-minded bigotry. This is just a song about having fun, and almost every lyric in this song is like a joycore slogan scrawled out in sharpie ink. This is exactly the kind of song that I need right now, and I wish that I had this handy this past Thursday night at the Hammerstein. (Click here to buy it from Juno.)

Weezer “Perfect Situation” – Nevermind the reactionary slams of Pinkerton loyalists – Weezer’s new album is actually pretty good. I don’t think that anyone could ever mistake Make Believe for being their best work, but to write off this record and the two that came before it simply for being uneven would be to misunderstand the band’s greatest strength. Weezer is a singles band. It doesn’t really matter if they put filler on their albums (there’s about eight good songs on Make Believe, up from six on Maladroit and five on The Green Album) because it’s all about the songs that will end up on their greatest hits collection, and that will inevitably become the best record in their discography. Watching their career unfold is basically like getting the best power pop cd ever slowly doled out over an installment plan.

“Beverly Hills” does nothing to damage their string of perfect singles. If anything, it’s one of their very best to date, up there with “Say It Ain’t So,” “Keep Fishin’,” and “El Scorcho.” I can’t help but feel that people who hate on “Beverly Hills” are guzzling crazy pills. It’s easily the best mainstream rock single of the year so far aside from Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone.” The song is a shoo-in for the next The OC mix cd, in as much as it is the premise and aesthetic of that show in the form of a three minute pop tune. “Beverly Hills” is essentially the ballad of Ryan Atwood, though the rest of the record, especially “Perfect Situation” and “The Other Way,” is pure Seth Cohen – cheerful and fun in spite of being selfabsorbed to the point of total obliviousness. At its best, the album sounds like a fantasy about being an American teenager in the 00s written by a guy who relates to them a little too well for his age and spends a bit too much time with them because he’s still an undergrad in his mid-30s.

Rivers Cuomo has always come off a guy in a state of arrested adolescence (but hey, that goes for a lot of artists) but the lyrics on Make Believe seem as though he’s either emulating the poetry and emotional intelligence of teens or writing especially for them. The specificity of context and attention to detail that made his early lyrics so charming and relatable are almost entirely missing from this record, replaced by direct statements presented in cold, unpoetic languange that nearly cancels out the emotional impact of what could be the most personal writing of his career. The lyrical content often seems very cynical, especially when one of the best songs on the album sounds as though it was written primarily to fill an underserviced niche in the marketplace for songs about loving your best friend, but if you give Cuomo the benefit of the doubt, you can’t help but assume that he’s an aloof weirdo with cold dead eyes trying to sing sincere, emotional music in spite of himself. That’s pretty fascinating to me, especially since I suspect that the guy might have Asperger’s syndrome after reading that recent cover article about the band in Rolling Stone. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)