Rivers Cuomo

“Alone: The Home Recordings

of Rivers Cuomo”

(DGC)

Weezer has always been a more complex musical proposition than most power-pop groups, and that’s due primarily to the genius and neuroses of lead singer and songwriter Rivers Cuomo. Cuomo’s semiautobiographical songs on Weezer’s self-titled 1994 debut (aka “The Blue Album”) about being a teenage misfit who loved KISS and Dungeons & Dragons struck a chord with other teenage misfits everywhere, while the painfully personal follow-up, 1996’s “Pinkerton,” turned Cuomo’s “Madame Butterfly” obsession and relationship failures into pop gold. Since “Pinkerton,” however, Weezer’s output has become increasingly slick and impersonal, missing that outsider edge that Cuomo once brought to his music.

Thus, the demos and lost songs collected on “Alone” are a timely reminder of how great Cuomo can be, as most of them date from before 1996. Listeners are treated to a ridiculous cover of Ice Cube’s “The Bomb,” a dirge-y early version of “Buddy Holly,” and, most enjoyably, a sequence of tunes intended for “Songs from the Black Hole,” a space travel rock musical that was meant to be the follow-up to “The Blue Album” until Cuomo decided to scrap it.

The infectious “Blast Off!” features sections sung by each of Cuomo’s three lead characters, plus their mechanoid, M1 (his parts are sung through a vocoder for appropriate robot effect), “Dude, We’re Finally Landing” offers Cuomo’s attempt at barbershop quartet harmonies, and “Superfriend” is a ballad so good that it should have made the cut for “Pinkerton.”

With Weezer currently working on its seventh album, let’s hope Cuomo’s recent trip down memory lane will help him regain the form that made his first two albums and these demos so memorable.

– TRAVIS GASS

Duran Duran

“Red Carpet Massacre”

(Epic)

Duran Duran may no longer straddle Planet Pop like a colossus with eyeliner and a wind machine but they still deliver surprises each time they release an album.

The first surprise about every new Duran Duran album for roughly the last 15 years has been that it exists at all. While most of their peers have long since drifted onto the nostalgia circuit or into day jobs, you have to give credit to Simon Le Bon and company for their refusal to call it a day and retire to a life of playing polo, punctuated by the occasional benefit reunion.

The second surprise is that, despite my soft bigotry of low expectations, they nearly always produce something that is pretty good in places.

And actually, “Red Carpet Massacre,” has a good few of those places.

“Night Runner” is a piece of subtly vicious funk that, tossed off by Timbaland and Justin Timberlake, admittedly seems almost devoid of Duran Duran’s fingerprints. But “The Valley” marries gothic guitars to the theme tune from Knight Rider generating a brittle electro-pop that, layered with Le Bon’s distinctive vocals, is pure Duran. So far so upbeat, but the band’s efforts to drag you back to the dance floor with them one more time are balanced by more introspective moments as on the single “Falling Down,” where Le Bon howls at the wind and pleads for, “someone out there to help me.”

And it seems Timbaland and Timberlake have. But this is by no means a takeover. There is enough here that is familiar, yet warped to promising effect, to hint that Duran Duran still aren’t going away, and may well have some more surprises in them.

– ADAM CORRIGAN

Bow Wow and Omarion

“Face Off”

(Columbia)

The hardest thing for those entertainers who experience success in their youth is making the transition to adulthood.

The police blotter is littered with former child actors. Fortunately, the music industry is slightly more forgiving, as Omarion, now 23, left behind B2K and Bow Wow, 20, left behind his Lil’ to release best-selling albums as young adults.

Now comes a little sumpin’ sumpin’ called “Face Off.” The pair, who originally collaborated on Bow Wow’s 2005 single “Let Me Hold You,” have teamed up for an entire studio album.

“Face Off” surprisingly isn’t an album extolling hockey. Instead, it details what it’s like to be young, virile, rich and famous, and all the attendant pitfalls (oh, that we all had such troubles). To summarize, the ladies all love us, but it’s hard to find the right one.

So, lyrically, the album isn’t terribly deep. But it’s also packed with phat hooks, enough to redeem “Face Off.”

“Face Off” is exactly what the title implies: two homies talking trash, both at each other and at any part of the world that would try to take advantage of them. This is something for Omarion and Bow Wow completists, and for those who would like to sample their works.

– DALE MCGARRIGLE

The Magnetic Fields

“Distortion”

(Nonesuch)

It seems that in the nearly four years since the last Magnetic Fields album, songwriter Stephin Merritt’s gotten a bit bored with the synth-pop-with-acoustic-guitars sound he has cultivated over 15 years. If the intensely reverb-heavy, fuzzy sounds of the appropriately titled new album, “Distortion,” are any indication of his mindset, that is.

Always an archly funny lyricist, Merritt’s 13 songs collected on “Distortion” are in keeping with the rest of The Magnetic Fields output: high-concept, acid-tongued ditties about love, loneliness and life in the often confusing modern age. He’s in perfect form – and in fact, it’s a much more lyrically barbed affair, as on the jaded “Too Drunk to Dream” or the hilarious, celebrity-targeting “California Girls.”

But musically, it’s a new venture for Merritt – he himself stated he wanted to sound “more like the Jesus and Mary Chain than the Jesus and Mary Chain.” And so we get squalls of feedback, for that classic recorded-in-a-tin-can effect that the aforementioned band perfected. Album opener “Threeway” is practically a surf-rock song, while “The Nun’s Litany” pits extremely heavy fuzz against lyrics that imagine the careers a nun might take, in lieu of her chosen one.

I can’t say that Merritt reaches the sublime levels of noise that JAMC did, but it adds a nice edge to the album, which is matched by the lyrics. “Distortion” is a fun experiment that doesn’t detract from what’s always been his greatest talent: writing smart, observant pop songs.

– EMILY BURNHAM