Return of The Rentals

After being an obsessive music collector and onetime music critic for my college newspaper during the New Wave '80s, the 1990s rolled around and I sort of lost interest in new music. It wasn't until around the mid-'90s that I decided it was time to play catch up and started paying attention again. One of the first albums a friend recommended to me on my comeback was The Return of the Rentals, Weezer bassist Matt Sharp's side project. I was instantly hooked. "The Love I'm Searching For," "Waiting," "Friends of P" and "Please Let That Be You" are still a few of my favorite songs of that long-gone era.

Legend has it that in 1998, post-Pinkerton, Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo gave bassist and founding member Matt Sharp an ultimatum: us or them. Sharp chose "them," sending him and his former bandmates down very different paths, which included an ugly lawsuit over song royalties.

While Weezer continued to find great success, Sharp and his Rentals took its time before leasing 1999's Seven More Minutes and then disbanded. MTV is reporting that Sharp -- who released one interesting solo album -- has decided to reunite The Rentals and is at work on a third album. This is great news to fans of the band, but I can't help but wonder what this "reunion" is really about given the fact that Sharp says he is auditioning and trying out people for the band. How is that a reunion?

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