Rivers Cuomo Plays Radiohead Straight

Weezer covering Paranoid Android is exactly as strange as it sounds and somehow stranger once you’ve heard it. Rivers Cuomo doesn’t try to punk it up or claim it—he just plays it, which is in its own way the most surreal choice available to him. The song is six minutes of Thom Yorke’s nervous system falling apart in real time, set to time signatures that shouldn’t cohere, and hearing it filtered through the band responsible for Buddy Holly is like finding a Rothko in a mall food court. It shouldn’t work. It sort of does. And the fact that it sort of does is the only interesting thing to say about it.