Even prior to the release of Hurley, Weezer’s eighth album already had a few strikes against it. First came the band-planted confusion about whether it was titled after Lost character Hugo “Hurley” Reyes (that’s actor Jorge Garcia grinning on the cover), if it was tied into a promotion with the clothing company of the same name, or, bizarrely, both. Second, frontman Rivers Cuomo tragically — if aptly — described its sound to Rolling Stone as “Frankie Valli mixed with Metallica guitars.” Finally, there’s the fact that Weezer has been cringe-inducingly sucky for at least the last five years, and that estimate is as conservative as Christine O’Donnell.

Relatively speaking, Hurley is an improvement over the gimmicky ridiculousness of last year’s Raditude, but that still doesn’t mean it’s any good. Mercifully, Lil’ Wayne is nowhere to be found, but there’s a WTF cameo from Semisonic singer Dan Wilson (“Ruling Me”), the G-rated replacement of ‘sex’ with ‘socks’ (“Where’s My Sex?”) and an electro-pop paean to female fans on Twitter (“Smart Girls”). And in the case of the latter, you know a song’s bad when you’re left wishing it were a cover of Brian Wilson’s rightly forgotten 1989 rap oddity. Only the syrupy Ryan Adams collab “Run Away” and the lo-fi, mandolin-filled closer “Time Flies” provide any kind of redemption, largely because the latter sounds like a cut from Cuomo’s Alone: The Home Recordings series.

First single “Memories” neatly summarizes the Hurley experience: It’s a gloriously dumb exploration of days past, with Guitar Hero riffage and head-slapping lyrics pining for “Playin’ hacky sack when Audioslave was still Rage.” As the years post-Pinkerton roll on, Weezer more closely resembles a former high school friend on Facebook, only surviving deletion out of pity with an ever-fading recollection of good times. But how good those times were…