You’re stomping your feet in time to the beat before Cuomo even starts to sing. A song like “Hash Pipe,” for instance, the second of its set, opens with a thunderous roar of power chords from Cuomo, lead guitarist Brian Bell and bassist Scott Shriner, with Wilson propelling them along on drums. Weezer is where the huge riffs come to hit on the sweet melodies. From his black-framed glasses, corduroy jeans and striped sweaters Cuomo is the nerdy kid who shreds on guitar while singing bittersweet songs of longing and love. He just chooses to project it in a quieter way. Weezer singer-guitarist Cuomo has nearly as much charisma as Urie. It makes good sense because their current album, “The White Album,” is one of the most California-oriented collections of songs they’ve done in their career. Drummer Patrick Wilson was parked on a platform that looked like the deck of a lifeguard hut or a beach shack, and scenes of summer and sand and sun flashed on the screens throughout the set.
The stage set this summer is designed to look like a beach scene.
The title track, “Death of a Bachelor,” found Urie belting the Vegas-style ballad like an emo version of Frank Sinatra, and “Crazy=Genius” and the crowd-pleasing “Golden Days” were also new to the band’s repertoire for the summer.Ī full Weezer show, unlike the festival sets and small club one-offs we’ve seen over the past year, features a lot more bells and whistles. And this summer has seen Panic! add a few more songs from it to its set list. The group has been touring all year for the album that arrived in January.
When Smith walked out on stage to give Urie a guitar before the song began, Anna Lily and her friend McKenzie burst into tears (friend Katie kept it together a wee bit better), so touched were they to see him there. This one belongs to Anna Lily: When Urie introduced “This Is Gospel” by saying he’d written it for a friend who’d been working on his sobriety, diehard fans knew he meant former Panic! drummer Spencer Smith. “So you can imagine how freaked out I’ve been for the last 2 1/2 months: ‘Holy (bleep) we’re touring with Weezer!’” Near the end of the set, he paused to talk about how awesome this summer has been, confessing that when he was 10 years old he stole his sister’s cassette tape of Weezer’s “Blue Album” and learned to play drums and other instruments from endless listenings. “It’s crazy to me – it’s 2016 and people think they can make laws to keep you from being who you are,” he said.
Before “Girls/Girls/Boys” with its message of love who you want to love, he told the crowd that he hopes the song carries a little bit of a political message to its listeners. Urie is a chatty fellow between songs, too, sometimes serious, often quite funny, and seemingly self-aware of his over-the-top persona. Other big numbers that make dads and daughters alike stand and sing along – the daughter with much greater lyrical accuracy than the dad, in our case – included “Girls/Girls/Boys,” “LA Devotee,” and “I Write Sins Not Tragedies,” the first big hit by Panic! way back in 2006. By the numbers, if you will, and so we begin with … Both get booked a lot lately on the same radio station festival dates around the country.Īnd then there’s Panic! frontman, Brendon Urie’s, longtime self-admitted fanboy crush on Weezer and its frontman, Rivers Cuomo, which he described to the Register’s Kelli Skye Fadroski backstage at KROQ’s Weenie Roast at the Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre when both bands played there in May.Īll that came together Saturday at Irvine Meadows for the final date of 41 summer shows Weezer and Panic! have played this summer, a terrifically fun night that featured 80-minute sets from both bands after a half-hour from Orange County native Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness to warm up the sold-out amphitheater.īecause we’ve seen these two bands a lot over the past year – the we being me and my daughter Anna Lily, a super fan of both bands, we’ll review the show in a slightly different manner. From the moment it was announced, Weezer and Panic! At the Disco made a whole lot of sense as a co-headlining summer tour: Both have a knack for catchy, melodic sing-along tunes.