Weezer - Weezer (Green Album)

Five years after Pinkerton flopped and Rivers Cuomo disappeared to paint his walls black and enrol at Harvard, Weezer came back with a record that is almost aggressively economical. The Green Album runs twenty eight minutes, every song is between two and three minutes, every guitar solo repeats the vocal melody note for note, and there is not a single confessional lyric anywhere on it.

That was the point. Cuomo has been explicit that after being punished for oversharing he wrote this one as pure craft, and Ric Ocasek returned to produce it exactly the way he had the Blue Album. "Hash Pipe" is a two and a half minute riff with a falsetto hook. "Island In The Sun" is the band's most streamed song by a distance and the closest they have come to writing something genuinely serene. "Photograph" and "Don't Let Go" do the same job with the same efficiency.

Purists still argue about whether the retreat into formalism was a loss. What is not arguable is that it worked: the album went platinum, put the band back on the radio permanently, and introduced Weezer to a generation who had never heard Pinkerton.

Reissued on black vinyl for Geffen, mastered by Vlado Meller and mixed by Tom Lord-Alge, dedicated to Mykel and Carli.