Weezer at The Piece Hall: Yorkshire gig tops Glastonbury and Download for US power-pop heroes
Beneath a sun-blazed sky, the Los Angeles-born power-pop heroes play up to expectations and unleash a cavalcade of fizzy, fuzzy tunes to delight fans.
“We’ve done Download, Glastonbury, London,” Rivers Cuomo tells The Piece Hall as the final rays of a late June heatwave flicker through the crammed courtyard.
“But this is the best - because you’re all Weezer fans!”
It has been an uncharacteristically short-hot minute between legs of shows on British soil for the Los Angeles-born outfit, typically given to half-decade-plus siestas that bridge their visits over the Atlantic.
Barely a year has passed since they last popped up on the far side of the Pennines, peddling their brand of chrome-buffed hooks and gleaming power-pop as part of a package run with the Smashing Pumpkins; here, they return to West Yorkshire three years on from a 2022 slot with Green Day in Huddersfield.
Nevertheless, such exposure has clearly not dulled their draw - tickets flew off the shelves for this one-off headline performance - and, even better, they arrive at this sun-blazed Grade II-listed marvel in full knowledge and embrace of the nineties-nostalgia brief that powers their lasting commercial appeal.
Several decades into a career effectively defined in critical terms by the legacy and influence of their first two records, Weezer know which way their bread is buttered; across an eighty-minute gig, they play expectations with a straight bat and unleash their fizzy, fuzzy tunes in absolute spades.
The transmogrification of Cuomo’s keen teen-angst texts into festival-friendly singalongs down the eras has come hand-in-hand with their subsequent sidestep into party-band mode, material buffed up to a mirrored sheen and played with crack-troop precision.
Beneath a baking sunset hour, it feels like pure alchemy; Hash Pipe, with its flexed crunch, is positively searing, while My Name is Jonas thrums with a kinetic hum.
Undone - The Sweater Song, with its loping gait and emo-build shuffle, proves a delightfully soporific breather as twilight creeps along the horizon.
At the middle of it all, the band’s frontman retains that glass-bottle nerd-aesthetic, now gracefully aged into dad-rock-barbeque form.
Island in the Sun finds winsome echoes of Brian Wilson, as The Good Life offers a reminder he can deliver at diametrically cacophonous full-throttle too.
By the point he unleashes the chunky snarl of Say It Ain’t So and new-wave delight Buddy Holly, he is bashfully beaming from behind his sweat-sopped brow.
“Halifax, Weezer loves you!” he cries, before vanishing with a jaunty wave.
You expect they will be back again sooner rather than later.