Twenty years after Weezer’s debut album practically invented the genre, Toronto four-piece PUP are giving geek rock an upgrade. And while these ten songs trade on Rivers Cuomo’s gawky verve – opener ‘Guilt Trip’ is the best song that wasn’t on ‘Pinkerton’ – ‘PUP’ is a gleeful paroxysm all of its own. Track after track, noise and nuisance constantly battle it out, neither managing to best the other. Instead, the tussle is the attraction; loud geekcore (the aforementioned ‘Guilt Trip’, ‘Mabu’), to-the-point indie-punk (‘Reservoir’, ‘Cul-De-Sac’) and bustling pop immediacy (‘Dark Days’, ‘Mabu’, the epic, slow-motion ‘Yukon’) combine in a frenzied rush of urgency. Intelligent and visceral in equal measure, ‘PUP’ is effortlessly cool, charmingly nerdy and wholly brilliant.
Mischa Pearlman