I'm one of those whiney dorks that laments Weezer's change in musical direction after the release of Pinkerton. There have been a handful of tracks that caught my attention since then, and tons of great non-album experiments from the years leading up to The Green Album. But by and large, this band is off my radar and I've said my piece about them multiple times.
Then Everything Will Be Alright In The End released. People whose opinions I trust about music started to say weird things, like, "hey, it's not horrible"or "some of these tracks are as good as the old stuff". I have an Rdio account, so it was trivial to give it a listen. And you know what? It's not horrible, and some of the tracks really are as good as the old stuff. But as I listened I was struck not by how much it sounded like "classic" Weezer, but by how much I was thinking of Ozma.
Ozma was always a band heavily influenced by Weezer's sound, but they managed to transcend their origin through ever maturing power-pop over subsequent albums. It's almost as if Ozma beat Weezer to their own future sound. Years ago.