The Winter of Weezer’s Discontent

One of my co-workers has two Chihuahuas. She listens to a lot of early Aughts alt and emo rock bands — Brand New, Taking Back Sunday, Third-Eye Blind, etc. Knowing that she a) loves dogs and b) loves alt rock, I Teams-ed her the link to “I Want a Dog,” the opening track of Weezer’s latest EP, SZNZ: Winter.

She replied, “Weezer is STILL making music?!”

This is likely a common but troubling sign if you’re a member of Weezer. It’s also the stuff of Saturday Night Live sketches on the band’s polarizing legacy. It’s also reminiscent of Jim Carrey’s Grinch when he reunites with his foster parents and asks, incredulously, aggravatingly, “Are you two still living?”

Weezer’s Winter is a seven-track EP that concludes a four-pack of EPs thematically styled after Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons concertos. Four seasons, four EPs, all released on their respective solstice or equinox dates in 2022. At 28 total tracks, and after 30-odd years and 15 studio albums, SZNZ proves that Rivers Cuomo and Co. are still living. Still making music. Still crunching. (That’s a technical term.)

And while Winter does crunch, it is also complex and substantive, catchy and bright, honest and dark. It is an inadvertent theological correction to the contradictions of our modern, digital existence.

There are moments that sound like Vivaldi. There are symphonic changes in key and tempo and time signature on several of the songs. I found myself giggling with joy the first time through “I Want a Dog,” as it metamorphosed from a “Butterfly”-esque ballad into something operatic and jarring. Listening to “Iambic Pentameter” is a frantic delight, with no telling what’s going to happen next.

Winter’s lyrical themes match the season. In an interview with Variety, Cuomo describes Winter as a “sad Christmas album.” It might be more accurate to say, borrowing the Narnian phrase, that it’s an always winter, never Christmas album. As such, there is a cold, theological bite to it. On “I Want a Dog,” Cuomo laments the compromises he’s made in pursuit of fame. On “Iambic Pentameter,” Cuomo wishes he could communicate in iambic pentameter in order to figure out what’s going on inside his “messed up head.”

This brooding sense of alienation tinged with regret deepens on “Dark Enough to See the Stars.” In the first verse, Cuomo asks, “Why was I ever born / And why did God make me?” Cuomo assumes that God “must have been high when he dropped me down here.” But in the bridge, Cuomo finds himself praying to this same God: “I don’t want to die alone / Lord, I’m running out of hope / I don’t want to die alone / Lord, I’m running.”

Running where is the question. The final track, “The Deep and Dreamless Sleep,” suggests a dark and impersonal opioid. “I Want a Dog” offers a different kind of vision. Cuomo hungers for life with a dog that will keep him company, look out for him, “lick [his] face,” and “guide [him] home.”

Every human longs for all of these things — love, companionship, true spiritual direction. But they won’t be found in a dog.

Such is the irony of the SZNZ‘s-long theological discourse. In the previous EPs, mockery of Christianity abounds amid a soundscape full of religious imagery. God is a “punk-ass” who can’t be bothered to get out of his lawn chair (“Lawn Chair,” Summer). Cuomo admits that he “could never follow orthodoxy” (“Get Off On the Pain,” Autumn). He trolls with song titles like “Blue Like Jazz” and “Wild At Heart.” But the griping and sarcasm don’t amount to much more than the New Atheism takedown-meme of, “There is no God, and I hate him.”

Yet in Winter, Cuomo expresses an honest and striking summary of the frigid state of souls alienated from that God. While talking about “Dark Enough to See the Stars” to Variety, Cuomo said, “I was just wondering, like, why would a creator make a creature, a being like me that’s in such a sad, lonely, disconnected state?”

Starving for connection, we murmur a prayer of desperation to a God we despise while seeking substitutes that can’t bring our cold, dead hearts to life. We’ll take the dog instead.

Oddly enough, Cuomo admits that he and his family don’t own a dog. They have two cats. And at the very end of “I Want a Dog,” right as Cuomo’s falsetto “Oooh” fades out, a cat meows. A thrill of hope.

Look, I don’t want to turn this into a debate about cats and dogs. Because it’s obvious that cats are the more spiritual animal. From ancient Egypt, to the Hebrew scriptures, to C.S. Lewis, cats, not dogs, are the metaphor-bearers. Jesus is not the dingo of Judah, afterall.

Maybe Cuomo — and the rest of us shivering in spiritual and emotional solitude — doesn’t need a needy, therapeutic lap dog for a companion as much as he needs a cat. A friendly cat, to be sure, but also mysterious and less desperate for constant approval. A good-but-not-safe cat who is Lord of the Seasons. Who can bring about a happy Christmas amid our bleak midwinter. A cat — nay, a Lion — who has overcome the deep sleep of death to bring us life.