Photos and Review by Jeff Palmucci
Galleries: Weezer, The Shins, Silversun Pickups
The premise of Weezer: The Gathering is that you are at a kid’s house party. That’s not me being cute — it’s literally the plot. Weezer’s set opens with a short film in which a scrawny Weezer fan tells the kids picking on him that Weezer is playing at his house tonight, then calls “Weezer’s agent” and offers the band 98 cents. He gets laughed off. So he draws Weezer’s logo and an infinity symbol, which somehow reaches Rivers Cuomo, who rounds up the band. That’s where the tour name comes from, and it’s genuinely funny.
Then the curtain drops on a full suburban backyard: a house, a picket fence, a campfire, string lights, a picnic bench, potted plants. The detail that sold it for me is that this kid clearly does not live in a nice neighborhood. There are sneakers hanging off the power lines. Somebody on the design team grew up somewhere.
Weezer played Sunday, September 27 at TD Garden, 9:05 to 10:55, 26 songs, with The Shins and Silversun Pickups. It’s stop 13 of a 32-date North American run supporting the new self-titled record everyone has settled on calling the Gold Album — which is why the invitation told fans to wear gold. Plenty did. Camera operators spent the night hunting down the best homemade gold nonsense in the building and putting it on the screens, so if you’re going to a later date: bring your silly gold thing. It’ll get on TV.
Silversun Pickups, and a complaint
Silversun Pickups opened and played five songs. Thirty-five minutes. “Well Thought Out Twinkles,” “The Wreckage,” “Dots and Dashes (Enough Already),” “Panic Switch,” “Lazy Eye“.
That’s my only gripe about them and it’s a big one. Photographers get the first three songs, so by the time I’d finished shooting and hustled back to my seat, “Panic Switch” was half gone. Their set was too short. They were terrific and they deserved 50 minutes.
The Shins
First time I’d seen them, and the Garden was noticeably into it — more than an arena crowd usually is for the middle slot. Eleven songs in 50 minutes, opening with “Simple Song” and running through “Australia,” “Saint Simon,” “Kissing the Lipless,” “Caring Is Creepy,” “Phantom Limb” and “New Slang”.
They also started a wave, which takes real nerve, because the audience could have left them hanging. However, they were delighted that the building actually went along with it. Then they closed “Sleeping Lessons” by tagging R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” onto the end, and the place came apart.
What Weezer actually played
This is the good news: the setlist is not a jukebox. Weezer opened the tour by dragging out material they hadn’t touched in years — “Keep Fishin'” for the first time since 2018, “No Other One” first full-band since 2019, “Lonely Girl” since 2014, “Slob” since 2005, and “Aloo Gobi” as a first-ever full-band performance. All of those made it to Boston, and we also got “The LA Sound” and “Across the Sea,” so the band is moving pieces around night to night.
New-album songs were kept to a sane portion: “Shine Again” opened the show, and “C.E.O.,” “We Might as Well Be Strangers” and the rest were spaced out rather than dumped in a block. Three decades in, that’s the correct instinct.
A couple of things that worked
“In the Garage.” Stripped down, Cuomo on harmonica, Pat Wilson on acoustic guitar. I teared up a little. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. It’s a song about a teenager hiding in a garage with his records and his posters, sung very emotionally by a 56-year-old man, and it did not come off as a bit.
The instrument shuffle. Cuomo moved behind the drum kit for “Pork and Beans,” which is the kind of thing that gets a polite arena “huh, neat.” Then Wilson — the drummer — picked up the lead guitar and absolutely leveled it. That’s the better trick. Earlier, during the acoustic stretch on “Longtime Sunshine,” Brian Bell played clarinet and Wilson was on acoustic. Everybody in this band plays everything.
The local rewrites. In “Pork and Beans,” the line about Timbaland knowing the way to the top of the charts became Aerosmith knowing the way. And “El Scorcho” arrived as “Goddamn you half-Boston girls,” with the Green Day concert swapped out for a Pixies concert. Cheap? Sure. Effective? The building screamed.
The crowd
Two things I keep thinking about.
First, the age spread. Weezer has been a going concern since 1994 and I expected a room full of nostalgic people my age. Instead there were kids everywhere who knew every word, including words to songs the band hadn’t played live in fifteen years. Whatever pipeline is delivering “El Scorcho” to teenagers, it’s working.
Second, “Undone — The Sweater Song.” Sure there are times when an audience sings along with the song. This went past that. For a stretch the Garden was straightforwardly louder than the PA, and the band let it happen.
Nikki Monninger of Silversun Pickups came out of the house on the set for a three-song run — “We Might as Well Be Strangers,” “Go Away” and “I Just Threw Out the Love of My Dreams” — which she’s been doing all tour. It’s the smartest use of a package tour I’ve seen this year: the opener’s bassist gets a second, much bigger set, and Weezer gets to play three duets they otherwise can’t.
Then beach toys came out over the barricade for “Island in the Sun,” which closed the night. Everyone loved it.
Worth it?
The preview material for this album leaned hard on a Rolling Stone line about it being one of the best Weezer albums of the century, which — as I noted in our August preview of this date — came from a feature interview rather than a review of the finished thing. Ignore all of that. It has nothing to do with whether this show is good.
The show is good. It’s an hour and fifty minutes, it’s paced like somebody thought about it, the deep cuts are real deep cuts, the set design is a joke that holds up for the whole night, and the band can play. The tour runs through October 24 in Los Angeles, then Japan in February and Europe and the UK in May. If it’s near you, and especially if you have a teenager who has somehow discovered Pinkerton, go.