Weezer Weezer (The White Album)

It opens with waves lapping ashore and ends with the same, beach-conjuring bookends on an album where guitars announce themselves like the coming tide and oblivious women are the sand in Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo’s swimming trunks. “Don’t you worry,” he instructs on opener “California Kids,” because a) He’s got the whole worrying thing down for you and b) The band’s 10th record is meant to reassure with a familiar, mid-’90s scruffiness.

Producer Jake Sinclair seems to have taken the same approach with these dudes that Rick Rubin has with Black Sabbath and Metallica: encourage them to reimmerse in the artistic inclinations of the past to reinvigorate the present. For Cuomo, this means a renewed lust for pointy-headed poetry with heart as piñata. On “L.A. Girlz,” he channels both Lewis Carroll and Dante’s The Divine Comedy over squealing guitars. Day-Glo synth sparkle on “King of the World,” and temptation and Burt Bacharach loom large on “Do You Wanna Get High?” “Keep on doing what you do,” Cuomo sings on the latter, leading by example with each word.