Some people might say Blink-182’s new album “Neighborhoods” sounds like redemption. I disagree. I think it sounds more akin to acceptance, the kind required of you as you grow up. When Travis Barker was sent to intensive care after that infamous plane crash, Mark Hoppus rushed to the hospital, but estranged friend and former bandmate Tom DeLonge sent him a letter. The letter reportedly contained two pictures, which DeLonge said in an interview with Rolling Stone aimed to communicate the following sentiment: “One was ‘Do you remember who we were?’ and the other was ‘This is who I am now.’”
Have you ever been angry with a friend? So angry you can’t even communicate why, you’re in such pain from being around them? You look at their photos on Facebook with a silent, furious resentment usually reserved for the aftermath of messy breakups with significant others. You stop talking to them cold turkey. You regret years of friendship. You won’t even resort to badmouthing them to your mutual friends, as you’re honestly too angry to actually pick a fight. Simply put: you just can’t deal.
That’s the overall feel of the sound in this new Blink-182 album– like friends, coming out the other side of a painful separation, communicating exactly how angry they were with one another. “Ghost On The Dance Floor” starts the album out strong. In this opener, you get the peppy, pop-punk vibe in the drum beat and the guitar riffs, but with a much more serious undertone in the vocals and the lyrics: “Yeah, I/ I saw your ghost tonight./ The moment felt so real./ If your eyes stay right on mine,/ my wounds would start to heal.” This lyrical heaviness pervades the tone of the rest of the album. “Neighborhooods” isn’t haunting, but it sounds like it once was haunted.
“Do you remember who we were?”
One of the first concerts I ever went to was Blink-182. I say one of the first because my first concert was, embarrassingly enough, a Ricky Martin concert. I was in the seventh grade, and Martin changed leather pants about seven times. Sue me. Embarrassing digressions aside, I fell in love with Blink-182’s brand of commercially viable punk rock. I knew all the words to “Dammit.” I was twelve, so I could still imagine myself making prank phones at twenty-three and never, ever wanting to act my age. I still remember the first time I saw the “All The Small Things” video on TRL, the moment was so nearly life changing for me. When other girls were deciding which member of N’SYNC was veritably The Hottest, I imagined myself rocking out on the drums à la Travis Barker. I got piano lessons instead. Such is life I guess. At least that still qualifies as a percussion instrument.
“This is who I am now.”
Well over a decade later for me (and a good seventeen years for the band members themselves), I can hear the maturity required for DeLonge, Hoppus, and Barker to simply come together to write the album. In “Natives,” the chorus croons: “Just let me go, go/ I’d rather go it alone./…So let me go, go/ I’m never coming home.” These aren’t kids who whine about their parents ruining their lives. These guys are the parents now. They aren’t the guys prank phone calling their girlfriends’s parents or desperately needing a friend to get through a break up. They have kids, pets, wives, homes, and, I’m assuming, alimony payments. Even the nearly mandator party song, “After Midnight,” feels more like the bandmates waxing nostalgic, rather than giving a sense of carefree, irreverent youth present in earlier songs, notably among them “The Party Song.”
Maybe being a fan for so long enhances this album. I started listening to Blink-182 as a wee middle schooler, so this more seasoned sound appeals to my own maturation in that way. I can hear how side projects, like Angels & Airwaves and Box Car Racer has informed “Neighboorhoods” without overpowering the qualities which made Blink-182 such an iconic band. Blink has always had the ability to write songs with a good ratio of light-heartedness, in “Neighboorhoods” carried by the beat, and a more serious, universalizing communication of youthful angst. ”Neighborhoods” does more than communicate adolescent angst, though, by including lyrics and vocal tone that convey not a loss of said angst, but a gain of self-awareness.
“Neighborhoods” is the kind of album that probably couldn’t have happened, or at least have happened as successfully, without the bandmates parting, if rather angrily, to go their separate ways and mature on their own. So while an eight year hiatus was a long time to wait, I’m glad we all did. As the title suggests, “Neighborhoods” isn’t about coming home, it’s about creating your own.
I guess this is growing up. Stream the album and chat with other listeners here.
Buy Blink-182′s “Neighborhoods” – Vinyl / MP3 / CD
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