Free Download at Operation Space Opera’s Bandcamp
Operation Space Opera is the name of the project a group of Weezer fans decided to record after years of speculation of how the long lost Weezer album would sound. Songs From the Black Hole originally supposed to be Weezer’s second album after their self titled debut, but was later scrapped and was transformed into the cult favorite Pinkerton. The album was supposed to be a space rock opera with all the songs flowing seamlessly together. There are several demos of the unfinished album floating around. There are a few songs from it in Pinkerton, some have also become B-sides from Pinkerton, and the rest in Rivers Cuomo’s Alone recordings. Operation Space Opera has taken these demos and fully recorded them with their own vocals and this is what has become of it.
Now for the review of Operation Space Opera’s work. Since this is an amateur group, some aspects should be taken with a grain of salt, and even though it’s easy to find comparisons with Weezer, they do a fairly decent job with this album, and the results are quite satisfactory. Production-wise, it was very well done, it doesn’t sound like a poorly recorded album in their basement, and in many aspects, are better recording quality than some of the demos that Cuomo has released. They even faithfully have the songs flow into each other for the “authentic” feel of how it’s supposed to be. Vocal wise, it’s a bit lacking in some places, but they are amateurs and this is a fan project, so I won’t be too harsh on them. They sound like they were in their school choir, but at least it was tolerable. What made this different than the compilations of the Weezer versions of these same songs floating around the internet, they have different vocalists singing the different characters, whereas the Weezer versions are all sung by Rivers (except for one song).
The quality of the songs are very well. There are a few songs that those who have listened to Pinkerton would recognize, since they were intentionally supposed to be on this album. For the “new” songs, I’ll discuss those when I do a review of the Weezer version, so stay tuned for those.
So those who are impatient and are really looking forward to Songs From the Black Hole and are either unsure of which of the multiple tracklistings of the demos floating around the internet, or just want to hear a good Weezer cover album, this gets the job done.
Grungie’s rating: 4/5