TORONTO -- It's funny how many bands never really top the artistic, if not commercial, success of their debut album. Very few of them have the guts to admit it, though, especially when they've got three or four others under their belts. But Weezer are not really like other bands.

Brilliant, eccentric and ultra-sensitive singer/guitarist Rivers Cuomo has never put the advancement of his group's fortunes first and foremost -- taking two years off to go to college at the peak of their success, reportedly spending a year in a darkened apartment recovering from leg surgery, and relying on meditation retreats rather than drugs and supermodels to ease his post-millennial angst.

At their Kool Haus show Friday, the California quartet -- currently on tour to support their fifth release, Make Believe, out tomorrow -- acknowledged the prominence of their first self-titled album, known as the Blue Album, in fans' hearts by relying heavily on its crowd-pleasing anthems.

Fully a third of Weezer's short but satisfying hour-and-a-quarter-long set was drawn from The Blue Album, including perennial hits like Buddy Holly, Undone (The Sweater Song), In The Garage, No One Else and My Name Is Jonas, all of which the crowd sang along to.

The rest of the set was made up of songs from the new record, with a couple each from the band's underrated second album, Pinkerton, and their other self-titled disc, the so-called Green Album, and nothing at all from 2002's Maladroit.

If the band members were worried about playing unfamiliar new songs for restless fans, they shouldn't have been -- Make Believe's dozen songs have been available for a while now on myspace.com, and it was clear that many people in the audience had heard them, greeting them with nearly as much enthusiasm as the old hits.

Cuomo has a talent for making little pop masterpieces by combining '70s metal guitar riffs with sweet melodies, goofy humour and lonely-geek lyrics.

And while it remains to be seen whether new songs like We Are All On Drugs, Hold Me, Haunt You Every Day and the new single, Beverly Hills, will enjoy the longevity of the older tunes, they definitely follow in their footsteps. If anything, the new songs rely more on the melancholy and, Beverly Hills' smartass tone notwithstanding, less on the humour. In fact, their lyrics might cause some to worry that Cuomo is getting ready for another sabbatical.

"I don't feel the joy/ I don't feel the pain/ You were just adored/ I am just insane," he sings in Haunt You Every Day. Peace includes the lines: "All these problems on my mind make it hard for me to think/ There is no way I can stop/ My poor brain is going to pop -- I need to find some peace."

No doubt fans are hoping he won't need to disappear to get it.