While they get plenty of hype, people seem to find a lot of reasons to dismiss Wavves—the grungy California garage outfit led by Nathan Williams—portraying them as drunken louts whose rapid rise to notoriety must

By the end, RiverSplash was on life support. For two decades, the event had marked the unofficial start of Milwaukee’s festival season the first weekend of each June, but following years of bad weather and even worse press after a 2008 shooting, organizers announced in December that RiverSplash wouldn’t return this year. That cancellation freed up a prime weekend for Summerfest officials...

Rivers Cuomo cannot stress this enough: He’s not trying to piss anybody off. Of all the criticism leveled at the Weezer frontman for the band’s new album, Raditude, it’s that suggestion that bothers him the most. “I get particularly frustrated when—and this has happened quite a lot—the press insinuates that I am intentionally trying to piss off our audience, that Weezer is creating music that it knows is bad and is putting it out there to make people angry,” Cuomo vents...

Say what you will about Weezer's divisive red album; though it might have been bad, it was at least memorably, ambitiously bad. But unsurprisingly, Weezer's trash-culture opus didn't placate the old guard that's hoping for a true follow-up to Pinkerton, and after the leak of two miserable, meatheaded new Weezer songs earlier this summer�"The Girl Got Hot" and (shudder) "I'm Your Daddy"�eve...

It's probably safe to say that Weezer's iTunes (and iPhone!)-only Christmas With Weezer is the weirdest, laziest 14-minute Christmas album ever. Whether they were being cheeky or earnest by doing six quick-as-hell, by-the-books covers of the most obvious Christmas traditionals possible (including "We Wish You A Merry Christmas" and "Silent Night") is impossible to tell, but by keeping these hy...

I�m in the early stages of organizing my best of 2008 list, and I�m struck by what a stellar year it�s been for just about every genre of music: indie-rock, soul, electronica, rap, Top 40, etc. I�m equally struck, though, by what a crappy year it�s been for modern rock. In the wake of post-grunge, modern-rock has mostly been an artistic dead-end, but in recent years there have been at leas...

From the New York Times' colorful review of Weezer's New York concert Wednesday night: Mr. Cuomo both led the show and observed it from different angles. He let all his band members take multiple turns singing. He played drums on a decent cover of Oasis�s �(What�s the Story) Morning Glory?� Ultimately he supervised an invasion of his own show, leading a ragtag amateur troupe of 30 or so ...

Get ready to laugh, cry or do both the moment you hear Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo start rapping on the band’s third self-titled album. That he does so over a song filled with piano and choral-chanting bombast (no lie) suggests that Cuomo may have seriously lost his marbles. His hysterically loyal fan base is no doubt . . .

Since Weezer died a decade ago, fans have had a difficult time reconciling themselves with the parasitic monster that assumed the band’s corpse. At times this new, faux Weezer made a convincing case that they were the same, power-pop-loving lads as always. Faux Weezer’s 2001 green album certainly sounded like the work of the vintage band. But when held to a mirror that album gave no reflectio...

Ludo earned countless comparisons to Weezer with their 2004 self-titled debut, and with good reason: The album sounded like the record longtime Weezer fans wished Weezer still made; a smart, catchy power-pop record with ample Moog synthesizers. On their newest, album, You’re Awful, I Love You, the band . . .