Rivers Cuomo - Alone: The Home Recordings (Geffen)
By: Thomas Hannan
It shouldn't come as a surprise to you that Rivers Cuomo is a guy who likes to spend a lot of his time on his own, in his house, with a guitar. And he records a lot of the music he plays. It's just releasing the stuff that he seems to struggle with - the only man on good Planet Earth who would rather go to college than be in a rock band (he quit Weezer for Princeton after their first, and best, LP) has managed to release just five albums, each about half an hour long, in fourteen torturous years. And the last one of them was absolutely bloody awful.
Why do we care then? Because the first two, especially, were indisputable classics. Furthermore, as any more-than-casual Weezer fan will inform you, often the demos and offcuts from Weezer albums are where their most interesting, touching music is contained. Fans will be hoping then that much of that sort of thing is included in Alone: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo, a solo demos album from the Weezer frontman which finds a release on February 4th.
Quoth the Cuomo: "This is a CD of my favorite home demos from '92 to '07 featuring a lot of never heard before songs, a few covers, a few songs from my unfinished rock musical Songs From The Black Hole and my original demo for "Buddy Holly."
The full track listing runs thusly:
1. Ooh
2. World We Love So Much
3. Lemonade
4. The Bomb
5. Buddy Holly
6. Chess
7. Longtime Sunshine
8. Blast Off!
9. Who You Callin' Bitch?
10. Wanda (You're My Only Love)
11. Dude We're Finally Landing
12. Superfriend
13. Lover In The Snow
14. Crazy One
15. This Is The Way
16. Little Diane
17. I Wish You Had An Axe Guitar
18. I Was Made For You
To prevent pant wetting due to over excitement, or perhaps exacerbate it, we've got hold of three of said tracks and made them available for streaming below:
Streams: