In what must be a Christmas wish come true for Weezer superfans, Rivers Cuomo has opened up the vaults and made over 2000 unreleased demos recorded over the course of the years 1976 – 2015 available for sale on his Mister Rivers Neighborhood website.
The 50-year-old emo/indie rock hero has made the demos available across ten different compilations, each spanning certain eras of his creative history. Rivers has really dug deep into his personal archives to put these together with the earliest of these compilations ‘Alone IV: Before Weezer’ featuring recordings of a six-year-old Rivers.
Each demo pack will set you back $9 and range from 26 tracks (The Best of The Demos) to a quite frankly ridiculous 1,113 tracks offered in ‘The EWBAITE Years 2011-2014’.
With this much material to sort through, there’s bound to be plenty of misses amongst the hits, a fact that Rivers himself cops to on the website. “For any demo: It might have silence. It might be wildly inappropriate. It might have super low sound quality. It might just be me rambling, talking, making sounds. It may have already been shared or leaked. It might be just a drum beat. it might not have vocals. It might be a duplicate of another demo. It might be an inferior version of another demo. The information provided, such as year and description, might be incorrect.”
Despite this disclaimer, the demo packs seem to be very well put together, with most tracks including some explanation from Rivers himself, which given the amount of material in the offer is quite the herculean effort. We now know what Rivers has been doing with his 2020.
For Weezer completists, finding the hits while learning even more about one of their generation’s legitimate musical geniuses, seems like an offer too good to be true. At Music Feeds we have our eyes and ears around that 72 track ‘Blue-Pinkerton Years’ bundle, but we absolutely could be tempted to dive in on the sheer weirdness that awaits us in the latter years.
There’s not much else we can tell you about the packs without shelling out the money to listen to them, so your best bet is to head on over to Mister Rivers Neighborhood and dive in, but first, TRY THE FISH!
