The Weezer Guy Walks Into a Club

Rivers Cuomo’s voice is not a club voice. It’s the voice of someone who catalogued his romantic disasters in a notebook and set them to three-chord guitar rock—precise, a little wounded, genuinely funny in the way only really sad people manage. Steve Aoki’s whole practice, meanwhile, is about collapsing whatever distance remains between the music and the body. Watching those two gravitational fields collide on "Earthquakey People" is exactly as strange as it sounds and exactly as fun. Cuomo’s phrasing drifts over the drop like he’s describing a mild structural emergency, and the dislocation between his register and the track’s ambitions becomes the joke. The joke is good.