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Although Spinal Tap failed to mention it, in addition to clever and stupid, there are also fine lines between infectious and annoying, personable and pretentious, and memorable and novelty. Clearly, in a double bill at Austin's Liberty Lunch, Ash was careful to respect those lines and Weezer to ignore them. How much that mattered, perhaps ultimately came down to how disposable you like your '90s power-pop.
From the opening "Lose Control"/"T Rex" combo, it was obvious Ireland's Ash weren't going to wait around between songs to see which side this crowd was on. Like their semi-breakthrough of an album, "1977," live Ash was mostly about the rapid delivery formula -- opening hooks, sugary chorus, and closing hooks.
That Ash is a bash 'n' pop outfit with the songwriting smarts to pull it off typically makes it a pretty good formula for keeping the short attention spans of Weezer's mostly pre-pubescent draw. And while singer/guitarist Tim Wheeler's Cobain-like straightforwardness may have been initially off-putting, the subtle diligence with which he orchestrated the segues between full on rockers like "Jack Names The Planets" and lighter fare like "Oh Yeah" was also undeniably captivating.
For the rare moments a slippery verse-to-chorus section appeared like it was about to overwhelm him, like on the otherwise infectious "Girl From Mars," Wheeler also had a short but lyrical guitar passage to get him through -- allowing Ash to transform their Big Star-driven recorded output into live Cream. And if Wheeler's knowing mid-solo smirks perhaps indicated that he was just stepping up the number of early-set blooze passages to appease the town that Stevie Ray built, by set's end Ash had also noticeably abandoned the plan and focused instead on driving home their penchant for Rush-style contrasts -- taking the overkill balladry of "Lost In You" straight into a gusty MC5-ish instrumental, "Hulk Hogan Bubblebath."
Unfortunately, Wheeler's need to close with Ash's only stateside hit, the name-dropping "Kung Fu," was indeed disappointing -- in that the tune's fluffy '80s nostalgia trip played better as an introduction to Weezer's cheap appeal-pleas than as a conclusion to their own singularly muscular set. So much for novelty free...
Weezer, on the other hand, had never pretended to be anything other than a geeky novelty act until this year's "Pinkerton" -- a conceptual set about the trials and tribulations of quick pop fame. If the sluggish album sales and this show are any indication, Weezer's next set may just be about quick pop failure. That said, Weezer still insisted on reducing Pinkerton's darker noise into an approximation of their 1994 self-titled debut-making the differences between Pinkerton's "Pink Triangle" and the Happy Days-hit "Buddy Holly" virtually indistinguishable.
As for the cheap tricks, they immediately set the tone by actually using the Budokan "this is the first song off our new record" line to introduce "Tired Of Sex" and "Getchoo" -- actually the first two songs off their new record. If there was anything more substantive in the fourteen songs that followed, it must of been lost on the crowd -- which mostly left after the sweater song, " Undone."
And therein lies Weezer's problem, they have just enough predictably hummable tunes to piece together a passable set, and yet too few true anthems to build any sort of anticipation. And so what this crowd mostly received was a last ditch effort at showmanship by an indifferent frontman (the shoe-gazing Rivers Cuomo) and a pandering water-spittin', wave-your-hand-in-the-air backing outfit.
Depending on how you look at it, that's either exactly the recipe for a