TWO SEATTLE BANDS HONOR THE 20TH ANNIVERSARY OF WEEZER'S BLUE ALBUM

I normally hold the belief that you should plug your ears and run far away from any "cover band" concert. There are some notable exceptions, though, like any band that dresses up and performs as the Misfits on Halloween (complete with devilocks), or Seattle's Silly Goose, who pay tribute to the oft-derided but no-less-catchy mall punk of Blink-182. But my favorite cover bands to see live are Weezer cover bands. On May 10, Weezer's self-titled debut album, aka The Blue Album, turns 20 years old, and two cover bands are set to perform at the Crocodile's Back Bar. Weezus will play The Blue Album in its entirety, while Goat Punishment is billed as a "conceptual deep cuts Weezer cover band" that will, if we're lucky, mine from the band's early catalog of B-sides, demos, and other rarities.

If cover bands are exercises in fanatical preservation, it makes sense that Weezer has spawned so many of them. (In Seattle alone, Weezus and Goat Punishment now join the ranks of Teezer, Half Japanese Girls, and other bands that have played countless Weezer cover nights.) Weezer fans consider the band's first two full-lengths, The Blue Album and Pinkerton, to be sacred texts, with Rivers Cuomo's lyrics serving as guides for sensitive social outcasts who still want to yell about their feelings. I would imagine that for many people in these cover bands, they first picked up their instruments because Weezer spoke to them like no other musicians had before. The Blue Album is a slick, combustible mess of big pop melodies, metal-inspired riffs, and tales of clumsy adolescence (and I prefer it overall to the buzz-saw guitar abrasions and problematic lyrics of Pinkerton). If this doesn't sound groundbreaking today, it's mostly because Weezer first blazed the trail. While you might have to spend upwards of $60 to see a Weezer concert today, and suffer through a post-Pinkerton discography that is laughably bad, The Blue Album is probably best experienced on a night like tonight, with a band that is eager to celebrate its timeless spirit. Crocodile Back Bar, 7 pm, $5.