ALBUM REVIEW: Blink-182 plays it painfully safe
When Blink-182 reunited, people were most likely thinking “Oh my, the band from my childhood is back together! I can’t wait to hear more great pop-punk music from them!”
With both melodic hardcore and easycore, genres that owe a lot to Blink, taking the world by force, the stars seemed perfectly aligned for a return to form by the iconic three-piece.
However, it would seem that Blink-182 had other plans. With the release of “Neighborhoods,” it’s safe to say Blink has decided to grow up and become a boring alternative band.
Gone are the fast power chords and speedy drumming, and in their stead comes a Space Rock atmosphere and synthesizers. Spoiler alert: it sounds terrible.
The music just sounds confused, everything has a muddled sound, and the atmosphere it presents is uninviting and honestly, quite ugly. It only takes one listen to the verse of “Natives” to know exactly how bad everything sounds when put together.
The sound of Tom DeLonge’s is amazingly unattractive for almost the entire album, and it sounds as if he blindly packed on a ton of delay, reverb and maybe tremolo or phaser to create some random Frankenstein’s Monster of a spacey guitar tone.
To be fair, the first half of the album isn’t entirely bad. Songs like “Snake Charmer,” “Ghosts On The Dance Floor” and the lead single “Up All Night” are catchy enough to mask the fact that Blink is sounding like the world’s worst The Killers rip-off.
Even “Natives,” the verse of which may be one of the worst parts of this album, has a really solid chorus that actually sounds like old Blink.
However, “Neighborhoods” totally poops the bed when the second single “Heart’s All Gone” shows up.
For starters, the song is preceded by “Heart’s All Gone Interlude,” a spacey two-minute instrumental that makes you fall asleep faster than a Coldplay ballad.
Once the song actually starts, listeners are greeted by an ugly guitar tone, an abysmal chord progression and unwelcoming vocals.
“Heart’s All Gone” is Blink’s one attempt to write a pop-punk song on this album and they completely and utterly botch it.
From here, the rest of the album is a straight descent to hell. Songs like “Kaleidoscope,” the '80s new wave influenced “This Is Home” and the so-ugly-it-could-be-a-modern-art-masterpiece, “Love is Dangerous,” are so astoundingly bad they make people kind of embarrassed to be listening.
This review isn’t done by some bitter Blink-182 fan that is salty that he isn’t getting “Enema Of The State, Part 2.” It’s literally that bad of an album, regardless of the band name attached.
To somberly quote Mark Hoppus, “I guess this is growing up.”
Rating: 1 out 5 stars Genre: Alternative Rock
