Weezer

The Blue Album
Geffen, 1994

The modern successors to The Modern Lovers were Weezer. The Lovers grew out of singer Jonathan Richman's infatuation with gutter chic pioneers The Velvet Underground, but plied a more accessible and radio-friendly style of rock and roll about girls, cars and Pablo Picasso. Twenty years later Weezer sprung up like a dorky flower in the wake of the grunge explosion and plied a more accessible and radio-friendly style of rock and roll about girls, surfing and Buddy Holly. Their eponymous debut, commonly called The Blue Album, was released a few weeks after Kurt Cobain's death and together with that event signalled the end of the collective downer that had spread outwards from Seattle like spilt chloroform during the early '90s. Ethan Hawke's woeful performance in Reality Bites probably didn't help either.

The Blue Album's first single was a nonsensical pop hit called 'Undone - The Sweater Song', which seemed to be about clothes unravelling at a party. Between sing-along choruses, the song had a tender guitar chime that echoed around the studio and allowed it to pluck at more heartstrings than a track about knitwear should. Singer Rivers Cuomo later said he was frustrated by the public's reaction to it. "It was supposed to be a sad song, but everyone thinks it's hilarious," he told a biographer. The confusion over whether Weezer were a novelty band or misunderstood nerds continued with the film clip to their second single 'Buddy Holly', which showed them performing on the set of Happy Days tottering up and down in matching outfits like bobblehead dolls.

But the third single, a heavy rock tearjerker called 'Say It Ain't So', was more straightforward. With crunching guitars and open-ended lyrics about a misfortune of one sort or another, it was vague enough to become the anthem for the woes of a million teenage boys and girls and is still remembered fondly by almost everyone I know. Unlike the grunge songs of the generation before, at the single's heart was the same crisp and unashamedly catchy pop melodies that drove the rest of the album. It set the style for Weezer's second and best record Pinkerton, which was released two years later to far better reviews and far fewer sales.