DEATH TO FALSE METAL

Released as an accompaniment to the deluxe reissue of Pinkerton, 2010's Death to False Metal is not quite a new album, and not quite a rarities retrospective, either. It's a collection of unreleased songs the band cut during their 15-year association with DGC, some dating back to the early days, some quite recent, but they're all given a nice new sheen that makes it sound like a relatively close cousin to Hurley, the band's indie debut that appeared just two months before this major-label swan song. Generally, the tunes lean closer to Weezer's classic power pop than either the all-things-to-all-people Raditude, or the glassy modern rock of Make Believe, and in turn, it falls somewhere between the inspired lunacy of the former and the formalist pop of the latter. Apart from the occasional pop culture reference -- the anti-suburban conformity anthem "I'm a Robot" dates it as a '90s artifact, the Mac-vs-PC conceit of "Odd Couple" pegs it as a decade later -- this is music that Weezer could have released at any time after their 2001 comeback, and while it's sonically a little more ragged than any one album, thereby betraying its origins as a compilation, song for song, it's one of their better records of the '00s, as it consists of the best songs, not tunes that fit the sound of a project. It's a wonder why a few of these cuts didn't pop up before this, but as a collection of outtakes, they hold together better than some of the band's proper albums. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine