Weezer has just released it's newest single "Thank God For Girls" and it is fucking great. After 9 studio albums and 26 singles, Weezer remains one of my favorite bands. They are a band I listened to like crazy in high school and college and Rivers Cuomo has always been someone who fascinated me. Something that I have always done is that I keep drawing to comparisons to Weezer and James Bond movies.
Everyone can agree that the James Bond films are uneven as are the actors who play Bond themselves. With that everyone can tell you their favorite and least favorite bond (Connery - Best, Moore - Worst) but one thing is for certain, people who love Bond movies LOVE Bond movies. SPECTRE is about to come out this week and it looks damn good. It already broke records in the UK and it's got the team behind the awesomely good SKYFALL along with Christoph Waltz, Léa Seydoux, and David Bautista.
Go back to Weezer, the early stuff - WEEZER (the Blue Album), PINKERTON, and WEEZER (The Green Album) - are all super strong albums. Bond is the same way with DR. NO, FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE, and GOLDFINGER - superb filmmaking.
Let me break it down.
Weezer's beginning is the Connery of their career. Aside from the albums great series of hits:
- Undone (The Sweater Song)
- Buddy Holly
- Say It Ain't So
- El Scorcho
- The Good Life
- Pink Triangle
- Hash Pipe
- Island in the Sun
- Photograph
Maladroit is Lazenby. It's good but different and not as understood as the predecessors.
'Make Believe' is DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER. It feels like what we've known before (Connery) but there is a is a little silliness.
I believe we just passed the Roger Moore era of Weezer's music career. We went through 2006-2015 a long span of years that are only kind of intriguing at times. Through Roger Moore's career there is relatively one good movie (LIVE AND LET DIE), two good Bond girls (Solitare and Melina Havelock) and three good villains (Francisco Scaramanga, Jaws, and Baron Samedi).
As mentioned in Chuck Klosterman's, EATING THE DINOSAUR, Weezer constantly has a fanbase despite have what is relatively mediocre albums with maybe one good song on them. The songs on RADITUDE and HURLY in particular sounded very similar to one another with maybe one song standing out (both also have poppy covers as bonus tracks on them).
Now back to 'Thank God For Girls' there is something mature yet cool. New but the same. This is so Timothy Dalton it's not even funny. People didn't really get the Dalton movies and there were only two of them but they are pretty good films. The plot of THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS is super cool and follows a sniper targeting Double-O agents, while a little slow at times it still falls in the category of a good Bond movie. Then LICENSE TO KILL, probably the most underrated Bond film of all time, featuring the brutal Franz Sanchez and features him feeding Felix Leiter to a freaking shark! It's so good. It's probably the most real of any of the bond films (including the Craig films).
I think if we are to follow Weezer in the recent years we will see it mature with Timothy Dalton. Be as complex as THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS and as real LICENSE TO KILL. Let's just see what happens. If Denise Richards shows up in a few years on a Weezer single, we'll know I was right.