There has always been a deeper side to Rivers Cuomo than his day job as Weezer frontman would allow. As much as his yearning for perfect pop hooks provided some interesting features to the landscape of American pop-rock, there was always something weird and possibly darker near the surface of the likes of “El Scorcho” and “Buddy Holly.”

Drawn from a stockpile of seventeen year’s (!) worth of demo recordings, Alone: The Home Recordings offers the chance to take a more intimate look behind the curtain, songs of solitude and rough creation; and by Cuomo’s own admission in the liner notes, “totally unafraid of what anyone would think because no one was there. I was freestyling.”

Though it spans eighteen tracks, this collection only barely scratches the surface of Cuomo’s vast catalogue of recordings. Totally believable when you consider he once told Rolling Stone that he wrote a song a day. With such prolific output though, the quality is not always going to even out.

The Home Recordings is patchy indeed - there are occasional drop outs in audio, poorly mixed tracks and iffy vocals. The result is a collection of obscure and unlikely covers (such as Ice Cube’s "The Bomb"), Weezer-songs-that-never-were and a slice of the concept rock opera that would have followed the band’s debut – Songs From The Black Hole. The album manages to provide examples of the quirky satisfactions of its creator, as well as filling in the missing points between album recordings. Particularly the gulf of Weezer inactivity between 1996’s Pinkerton and 2005’s self-titled reboot, as Cuomo undertook another college degree.

All very interesting stuff… if you’re a Weezer fanatic. What this means is that hardly anyone else will enjoy this collection. It’s hard to deny the pop kudos of tracks such as “Chess”, “Lover In The Snow” and of course an early demo of “Buddy Holly”, but in this I-tunes age, the casual listener can simply cherrypick the favourites without having to endure the more idiosyncratic fare that makes up the album.

 Alone: The Home Recordings goes some way to achieving its initial goal in providing an audio portrait of a unique talent in modern rock, but it could have gone further. Perhaps a two disc compilation or even a box set would have sated the appetite that is whetted with this single disc compilation. As it is, it will frustrate the Weezer fans for its brevity and simply confuse everyone else.

Rating: 2 ½ basement tapes out of 5