If the video for "Up All Night" is any indication, Blink-182's worldview is one still sorely lacking of adults. Unlike the sunny disposition of their earlier California punk pop, however, this worldview is no adolescent fantasy of poop jokes and porn stars. Instead, Neighborhoods, their first new release in eight years, is almost dystopic in its darkness: it's filled to the brim with menace and an almost subtle dread that could be ironic for a band that's so loud.
Viewed as an extension of 2003's Blink-182, such grandiose grimness could easily be excused. The eponymous release featured a more mature sound as the band experimented with larger sonic palettes. They embraced larger arrangements, punishing precision and a wide range of post punk influences that veered from new wave keyboards to hardcore brutality. Even the Cure's Robert Smith stopped by to join in the fun for a song. And by "the fun" I can only mean an almost romantic sense of yearning for a world beyond the stifling growing pains of adulthood. Anyone hoping for a reason to stop being turned off by Blink's meandering sense of juvenalia could only be happily suprised if not highly enthusiastic about this turn of face.
Eight years later, we're treated to Neighborhoods, an album that serves as a reminder as well as a rejuvenation. And while long time fans are celebrating this as proof of the band's renewed existence, skeptics should celebrate too. This is a second chance for the band that never really got to stretch and enjoy the confident new footing they found in growing up.
Of course, the adolescent pangs of loneliness, guilt and aimless drift are still there. "The universe has left me without a place to go," they sing in "Ghost on the Dance Floor." But there's also a doggedness to Neighborhoods that goes beyond any previous yearnings. Vocally, the songs are delivered with the confident defiance that arrives only with age and survival. Tom Delonge, in particular, sounds years older. His vocals are delivered with pained youthful optimism but he backs it up with the conviction of an older soul who knows its true worth. Mark Hoppus, the band's more conventional vocalist, is the ballast of the record as he locks into step with Delonge. At moments on the last album, he seemed in danger of falling behind in his band's more "emo" conversion. But here, his vocals pinball off his partner in kinetic little phrases that still manage to be hummable. And hummable is good when the majority of your songs take place in the vast emotional wasteland of late night isolation where the only company you keep is your own thoughts.
Still, there's a solidarity to Neighborhoods that could never come close to telling the story of Blink-182's last eight years. Check off any "behind the music" style checklist, it's all there: band tensions, hiatuses and eventual break ups, communication breakdowns, addiction, hit and miss side projects, public divorces and a very high profile airplane crash that almost killed one member. And eventually, the final renciliation. Instead of sullying the new material with a jaded bitterness, however, the trials of the last eight years has simply justified their grit.
Travis Barker, whose near death experience spurred the reconciliation into action, brings more grit than anyone. The precision and style of his drumming is more than artistic achievement, it's a physical feat and one that he consistently performs through the whole of the record. Whether its ambient keyboard flourishes or long drawn out guitar notes drenched in reverb (at moments, it's hard not to imagine Delonge dressed in black with lipstick as he sits in his room and listens to old vinyl), there's Barker pushing the songs along like the Cure's Disintegration on hi-speed dubbing. Just by presence alone, Barker manages to make the record feel like a celebration and reaffirmation of life. Especially if your idea of celebrating involves sprinting a marathon after a head on collision. And while Neighborhoods doesn't possess the stylistic breadth of it's eponymous predecessor, it still manages to make both the marathon and the collision pretty damned thrilling.
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