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Rivers Cuomo doesn’t hate Pinkerton anymore. The Weezer frontman has gradually warmed up to the band’s sophomore effort, which had long stuck out from their oeuvre the way Super Mario Bros. 2 feels like an orphaned masterpiece in the overall Mario canon.
But while the now-30-year-old LA quartet treated the Lands End stage to “Pink Triangle,” a stellar track from that quasi-forbidden 1996 album—as well as the still-unreleased song “I Just Threw Out the Love of My Dreams”—Cuomo’s vocals were almost entirely buried and the energy level was lackluster at best. It might not be entirely charitable to compare them to Green Day (not least because of the latter’s pyrotechnics and hometown connection), but whichever sound techs helped the East Bay punks excel on Saturday night would have been more than welcome today. Cuomo couldn’t rally the crowd—which, for a cusp-of-sunset performance on Day Three, feels like a genuine fail.
Outside Lands 2022 may go down as the bro-iest incarnation of this long-running festival, both in terms of vibe and fashion. (As a testament to the bros, though, it’s positively amazing to bring this many people together, with pent-up pandemic energy that still hasn’t quite been released, and encounter virtually no violence whatsoever. We’re still all in this together!) However, the best acts of the weekend skewed overwhelmingly female.
Pop singer Griff, rocking a ponytail that could have been a Ruth Asawa sculpture, had everybody singing along to “Black Hole.” British duo Wetleg gave a performance that was perhaps not as dynamic as a heavily perspiring crowd hoped for. They closed out with their best-known song, “Chaise Longue.” (How do you not sing, “Hey you, in the front row / Are you coming backstage after the show?” without giggling at least a little?) And if you went hard the last two nights and needed salvation in the form of Black femme house, DJ Minx took you to church and brought you to the Lord. (The SOMA tent wasn’t ready for a day of full sun, though.)
And at GastroMagic, James Beard-award winning chef Daniela Soto-Innes coaxed Pusha T into eating one taco after another as the crew tossed lollipops from a busted piñata into the crowd, giving him a pass when he slathered some tartar sauce onto it barely 90 minutes before he took the main stage.
The dudes, for the most part, couldn’t bring it. “I’ve come to play some sh–ty music and get f–ed up while we do it,” said headliner Post Malone after taking the stage almost 15 minutes late. Love him or hate him, he’s versatile as hell and his stage presence is magnetic, but habitual attendees who remember previous Outside Lands that crescendoed with The Who or Janet Jackson may leave feeling unsatisfied.
Rigged for impenetrable fog, the lighting scheme seemed a bit out of place, with clear skies at 8:30 p.m. and beyond. Was this the hottest year ever? It’s a contender. Was it also one of the most tepid? Quite possibly that, too.