The Rentals
What is it?: Matt Sharp’s breaking-out-from-Weezer 1995 debut album with a new co-ed group named The Rentals. It is future-pop in a past-perfect tense, a love letter to shiny things and the wiring inside synthesizers, and almost surely the best thing to come out of Weezer’s early years outside of that band’s first two albums. We don’t normally deal in gossip here, but the main source of friction between Sharp and his bandmates (or possibly only Rivers Cuomo) has been said to be that Sharp wanted more input on the sound of the band. So if we’re asking what this offshoot album really and truly is, then the honest answer is that it is a glimpse inside an alternate-universe Weezer, one inside of which other genuinely gifted members held a certain amount of sway over the band’s creative directions and concoctions for better or for worse. Return brilliantly makes an outstanding case for the better.
Why isn’t it on vinyl?: This is a mudpuddle of he-said’s and she-said’s, to be honest. In previous interviews, Sharp has been quoted as basically saying it is a question of rights and ownership made all the more murky by those things changing hands from label to label over the years. He has further said that there have been efforts by him and others over that time to lobby for and/or self-release a version on wax, as of this writing none of those efforts have paid off.
Why should it be?: Put simply, to reclaim the message lost in the machine so that it’s not lost forever. Return is a document of rebellion against creative dictatorship. The LP finds our hero “down with” anyone who is a friend of the illustrious “P.”; it covers insecurity with bravado in the cheekily taunting “Brilliant Boy”; it gently consoles us as we find the will to “Move On”, upward and out from stagnant circumstances; and the band brings it all back home with generous helpings of “Sweetness and Tenderness”. It is a masterclass in making the kitschy into the truly cool and the supposedly cool into the outright laughable, a soundtrack to riding in cars with gee-golly mischief at the front of the brain. Perhaps the highest praise I can give it is that it is a silly album for smart people. It seems difficult to walk a finer line.
