Send "Blink" Ringtones to your Cell 
| Sputnikmusic |
 There’s something going on here. This isn’t a Blink-182 album as I understood the term. To me, a Blink-182 album always seemed playful. Even the last record, which found maturity cracking through the pop-counterculture artificiality of the Mark, Tom, and Travis show, claimed adolescence. But Neighborhoods is an album from Blink-182 that, post-divorce and post-reconciliation, escapes the cultural trope of Blink-182. While heyday peers cling to trends that’ve long since died, Blink explore, not so much shedding their image as they are disinterested in reclaiming it. Which isn’t to say this album is a radical departure; the old Blink is still bouncing away in Neighborhoods, with big crunchy power chords and Travis beating out impeccable pop beats. But they’ve aged. The way they were intimate, the way they invented overwrought relationships and sung them only to us, that’s gone, and in its place is non-committal ambiguity, a request for us to color in sketches of romance and suburbia with our own experience rather than a more direct pandering to nostalgia. So there’s that; by not rehashing the Blink-182 of yore, they mind the lessons of 21st Century Breakdown, Taking Back Sunday, and other interchangeably terrible records from the scores of pop punks riding the coattails of faded glory. Neighborhoods is certainly the most ambitious Blink-182 album, both musically and politically. Whereas Blink-182 have hitherto written from a very identifiably personal place, here, they turn their sights outward, singing to literally everyone. On lead single “Up All Night,” generalities like “everyone falls and spins and gets up again with a friend who does the same” take the focus, while “you” appears only as a personality-free audience surrogate in the vapid chorus: “let me get this straight, do you want me here as I struggle through each and every year?” How these lines relate is irrelevant; the lyrics succeed in being pleasant sounding clichés whose meaning is obvious, as if Blink crafted the least complicated thing in a misguided attempt to speak for others instead of themselves. (That or it's just lazy songwriting, but giving the benefit of the doubt...) It’s possible and borderline giving Tom way too much credit to argue that this all-inclusiveness is part of an Arcade Fire-esque reimagining of the band as zeitgeist poets, but should that be the case, Neighborhoods is less The Suburbs than it is 30 Second to Mars’ This is War: superficial and trite, also with the reverb pushing everything to the stars and subsequently to shit. Tom’s fascination with making songs sound like they’re being performed on a mountain or something carries over to Neighborhoods, exposing the band's desire to make important music. This isn't a problem in itself, but its constantly undermined by his reliance on tactless platitudes. On “This is Home,” over gallons of dream-pop synth ooze, Tom lets out “Let’s dance in perfect harmony,” and on “Love is Dangerous,” he actually sings “Love is dangerous” with a straight face. Unabashedly sentimental, he sounds as he did with Angels and Airwaves: inflated, a base romantic with a huge sense of self importance....full text |
| Wegotthiscovered |
| Eight years might not seem like a long time for some people. It’s just eight more years of living life, going about your life as you normally would. But when you’re 11, 8 years is the equivalent of a lifetime. Because of that, it’s been a lifetime since I’ve heard anything new from Blink-182. When I was 11, I was stuck in a musical hell that consisted of random pop or country music, or pretty much whatever my family listened to around me. It wasn’t until the first time I listened to Enema of the State that I realized I was in control of what I took in. This is a story that has been told so many times: “[Insert band here] changed my life!” But this statement rings completely true about Blink-182 changing my life and those of many of my friends in school. We would sit around and listen to Take Off Your Pants and Jacket and laugh whenever they made a penis or fart joke, and listen closely when they would sing of broken homes. We listen to what we do today because of Blink. When their self-titled album was released in 2003, it completely blew everybody’s minds. The young jokesters from California had grown up, but in a way that alienated nobody. Even greater things were in store for them. But then in 2005, amidst inner turmoil and scheduling conflicts, Blink-182 broke up. And for 6 years, we were left to think that was it. An amazing band had peaked and just disappeared at the height of their career. Some of us fans held our hope close to our hearts, knowing that couldn’t be the end. +44 and Angels and Airwaves were just side bands, Blink would live forever. For those of us who waited, February 8, 2009 was the night we had been waiting 6 years for. I remember seeing them in concert for the first time on their first reunion tour, and it almost brought me to tears hearing them belt out Dumpweed on stage. It felt like everything was right with the world again. All of this brings us to Neighborhoods. Their first album since getting back together, it is the product of 8 years of growth, new life and death. The darkness that was beginning to seep into the self-titled album has become fully realized, and instead of falling into it, the trio has learned to harness it and ultimately cope with it. Neighborhoods is the album that was not only expected to follow their self-titled release; it is the album that was meant to follow it....full text |
| Thevine |
| Suffice to say, when Blink-182 announced their hiatus in 2005, the gross demographic above the age of 21 was largely unaffected. And if you were a Blink fan outside of your formative years, well you probably abstained from admitting it. Blink has endured this kind of ignominy, ever since far-exceeding the expectations of a small-time San Diego punk rock band and etching their name in the history books, by joining the ranks of the loftiest chart toppers in modern music. Maybe it was all the dick jokes. Mark Hoppus,Tom Delonge and Travis Barker have always been calculated with their art, even when they're cracking funnies about feces and farts. The rise of this band has been hallmarked by their ability to remain avant-garde in a genre that is renowned for hackneyed, paint-by-number reincarnations of the handful of icons who have come before. When Blink-182 released their self-titled record in 2003, they managed to break away from the inanity which had ostracized them from the masses; hell they even managed to get Robert Smith on a track. And just when it seemed like they had worked out all the kinks in their giant machine, they up and vanished like a fart joke in the wind. For six years. The band formed new side projects: Hoppus and Barkers's electronic-tinged pop-punk group Plus 44 and Delonge's overwrought Angels and Airwaves. A string of albums ensued which never quite reached the desired acclaim (particularly for Delonge) and were deemed OK by fans and critics alike. Sill, all three remained irremovable from headlines -- Barker went down the path of reality TV star with his pop corn doozy Meet the Barkers, while Hoppus and Delonge remained at the forefront of a multitude of business venutures, that saw them move into podcasting, fashion and social networking. In 2008 a pair of tragedies would become the catalyst for the group's reformation. Long time producer (and suggested fourth member of the band), Jerry Finn, would die of a brain aneurysm at the age of 39. Several months later, Travis Barker would be involved in a grisly plane crash which claimed the lives of two of his friends, sparing his own and that of (the now deceased from a drug overdose) DJ AM. These two events would see the trio talking again and subsequently herald the reconstruction of the band and the launch of Blink 182, 2.0. Thus, two years later, Neighborhoods, the seventh studio album is born. Much in the same way 'Feelin' This' unfenced Blink's 2003 self-titled, a discernible Travis Barker rattle opens the record, proclaiming the denouement of an eight-year drought and the birth of a rejuvenated and ripened Blink-182. Delonge's refrain of "I saw your ghost tonight / it fucking hurt like hell" eludes to a number of plausible plot lines, the most obvious being the aforementioned cataclysms....full text |
Blink lyrics
|
| ||||