Album Review – Blink-182

Review — By Andrew Evans on 25/09/11

The earth has slowly rotated precisely 2869 times since Blink-182 last released an album. It went quickly didn’t it? When the band announced they were going on “indefinite hiatus” in February of 2005 as a result of building tensions and bad blood between the three of them, they did so 15 months after releasing their greatest work: a self-titled record that dropped the penis jokes, upped the minor chords and sold millions. It was, dare we say it, a triumph of maturity.

It is perhaps due to the quality of that record that ever since their 2009 reformation, anticipation for its follow up has been particularly high. That it has taken two-and-a-half years to get to a position at which they are happy to release new music suggests that Neighbourhoods isn’t going to be the back to basics pop-punk album some would love them to write. Neighbourhoods follows the more protracted writing and recording of Blink-182, a record for which the group spent a lot of time in a rented San Diego house experimenting.

And now, with the record blaring out of the speakers, what’s instantly noticeable is that the darkness of Blink-182 tracks like Obvious and Violence is still very much there. Neighbourhoods is an album obsessed with the temporary nature of human existence, which is unsurprising considering the two catalysts for their reformation: the passing of their long time producer Jerry Finn and a plane crash that left drummer Travis Barker and DJ Adam Goldstein as the only surviving members, events that happened within a month of each other in late 2008 (Goldstein was found dead in his apartment a year after the crash). What’s My Age Again and All The Small Things Mark II it ain’t.

This can be most clearly seen on the albums first two tracks. The Tom DeLonge led opener Ghost On The Dancefloor – a song written about listening to music and feeling as though someone who has died is right next to you, an idea that resonated with Barker especially – mixes arena-sized hooks with dark, biting lyrics: “I saw your ghost tonight, it fucking hurt like hell”. It’s followed by the frantic but sugar-laced Natives, on which Mark Hoppus’s chorus chimes “we’ll have the time of our lives, though we’re dying inside” over a deliciously poppy hook, which follows DeLonge’s hard-nosed verse.

After the sledgehammer lead single Up All Night – “all these demons, they keep me up all night” – it’s After Midnight that offers some (relatively) light relief. A Blink classic in the making, a melancholy DeLonge verse swells into a stadium-ready, bittersweet Hoppus chorus in which lovers sleep arm in arm before falling apart at the weekend. It’s one of the record’s slower moments, and when surrounded by crunching guitars and heavy lyrics, the song shines all the brighter because of it.

Elsewhere, Wishing Well is a delicious slice of pop-punk that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Take Off Your Pants and Jacket, it’s “la-da-da-da” pre-chorus as catchy as anything they’ve ever written. This Is Home is a synth-driven, two-and-a-half minute beauty on which DeLonge wants to dance “like fucking animals”. Its absolutely infectious. The closing Love Is Dangerous sees the band aim for the dancefloor with a disco groove that, after its thumping intro has found rest, suits them very well.

There have been many Blink-182 fans that have spent the last 2869 days wishing for some new music. They’ll also be many a young music fan to whom Blink-182 mean very little – Arctic Monkeys have released all four of their albums while these three men have been doing other things – and they’ll be more than a handful of 25-30 year olds that grew up with Blink-182 sound-tracking their teenage years. The true masterstroke that Neighbourhoods manages is to not only appeal to each these demographics, but become essential listening for all three of them.

If you used to love them, or if you’ve never listened to them before: You Need This Album.

 

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