blink-182 returns with adjusted attitudes
By Ben Wener
Orange County (Calif.) Register
It's maybe halfway through blink-182's all-day media gambit, the first big push for its progressive, self-titled sixth album, which arrived in stores Tuesday — and the constant onslaught of repetitive Q-and-A sessions is enough to drive anyone mad. Already bassist Mark Hoppus has endured, by his count, a dozen radio interviews and three 15-minute chats with print journalists.
He should be flipping out any moment.
"Nah, this is just the beginning of the process," he says congenially. "It's still pretty new and cool. Maybe tomorrow I'll be snapping."
At the time of our phone conversation a month ago, fears of piracy heightening daily, no music was available to hear, save for blink's latest single, "Feeling This."
It's a multilayered aural creation with a heavenly harmonized ending that, it turns out, is indicative of the entire album only inasmuch as it made maximum use of the band's new home studio in its native San Diego.
About that, Hoppus loves to yap. He speaks excitedly about the amount of equipment blink employed: 70 guitars, 30 amps, "I think Travis (Barker) had five or six different drum kits. At one point he had 30 or 40 different snare drums alone. There were pianos, keyboards, turntables — all kinds of stuff. It was just one big musical laboratory."
The result is the 14-track "blink-182" takes a significant sonic leap beyond the pop-punk that the group stretched as far as it could go on its previous two mega-sellers, "Enema of the State" and "Take Off Your Pants and Jacket."
Certainly the band hasn't forsaken the most integral elements of its approach: There are still plenty of speedy rhythms, thrashy power chords and snotty attitude, though there is far less of the halting singing that Hoppus and guitarist Tom DeLonge made a blink hallmark via smashes such as "All the Small Things" and "Dammit."
But the expansive, downcast, sometimes spectral sound is merely a reflection of an album lyrically consumed with sorrow and uncertainty about the world, concerns that the final refrain from "Feeling This" ("so lost and disillusioned") only briefly suggests.
Gone is the juvenile lusting after "the girl at the rock show," here replaced by Hoppus indulging in romantic anguish (the deep-blue "I Miss You," bolstered by a bed of swelling synths).
The King of Gloom himself, Robert Smith, even shows up for a very Cure-like cut, "All of This," in which he laments "another night with her, but I'm always wanting you."
Glaringly absent, too, is the trio's typical foul-mouthed humor and horniness, perhaps best signified by a switch in album titles.
Instead of chipper tunes about teenage angst and pranks, now there are several pieces equating broken hearts with global violence ("How do we fix this if we never have vision?" asks "Obvious") and which angrily wonder if such disgruntled souls can cope with a crumbling world view.
"I'm sick with apprehension," DeLonge sings. "I'm crippled from exhaustion, and I dread the moment when you finally come to kill me."
Not exactly lightweight fare. Overall, it's a considerably darker blink than anyone could possibly imagine — than clearly I could have imagined while talking with Hoppus after having only read the album's lyrics.
"For me," he says, "the lyrics on this record are a lot more personal than anything I've ever written before."
Anyone needing an example of how post-Sept. 11 America is a divided place to live in now has an ideal one: You know something isn't quite right when the three endearing clowns of blink-182 turn serious. Yet what led them to this point?
"I think it has something to do with the routine we had been in," Hoppus says. "At the end of the last tour, we had been working so long and hard ... that everyone was really ready for a break. There weren't internal problems in the band. We all just needed to take a step back for a while."
Once they regrouped, "everything felt fresh and new, and we just went in with the attitude that if we think something sounds cool and means something to us, then we're gonna do it. We're not gonna second-guess ourselves and worry about expectations," Hoppus says.
