Review Summary: apologise for the past; talk some shit, take it back
"2023 - who the fuck are we?" is the second-to-last question asked in blink-182's
One More Time, and it hangs in reverse like a reflected shadow across an album most assumed would never exist. It's a surprisingly canny question from Tom DeLonge, he of the airplane-arms, aliens, Angels and Airwaves, one of music's most notorious flakes. But it fits with the new man we see in the extensive Zane Lowe interview on Apple Music - candid and down-to-earth, graciously giving shoutouts to Matt Skiba and smiling through recounts of both of his ugly departures from blink-182, DeLonge claims to have been through a borderline ego death upon learning the news that Mark Hoppus was sick with lymphoma. Cynically, this is a familiar tune for us who went through the same song and dance when Travis Barker barely survived his plane crash in 2008, but Tom isn't the only one singing it this time. Hoppus seems like a man reborn, soaking in the crowd's adoration night after night in videos of their current tour, shamelessly blasting "The Adventure" in his dressing room, and talking about, again, his new lack of ego that let an old Box Car Racer demo turn into one of
One More Time's best songs. The proof is in the pudding, they say, and while
Neighborhoods is a better album than its reputation suggests, all the unresolved tension is evident in a disconnected, scattered album.
One More Time isn't that. The answer to the question DeLonge asks seems to be they are three dudes reconnecting their friendships over a shared love of their music and relief to be alive. It may come with plenty of flaws and questionable inclusions, but from the euphoric hooks (good luck getting "ole ole ole ole" out of your head for the next month) to the constant trading of vocalists on almost every song, including the debut of Travis fucking Barker on the mic after 20+ years,
One More Time's enthusiasm is absolutely infectious. The most evenly split release between DeLonge and Hoppus since 2001's
Take Off Your Pants and Jacket (whose summer-high to winter-loneliness arc seems to have been the roadmap for Barker in the production of
One More Time), the album opens perfectly with "Anthem Part 3", a shameless nostalgia bomb of shimmery guitar licks, machine-gun drumming and intertwining vocal hooks that will inject serotonin straight into the veins of all you older millennials who still spin
Enema of the State on the commute to a boring office job. DeLonge dominates the first half of the album overall, riffing like it's 2001 through lost
Box Car Racer gem "Terrified" and delivering a ecstatic hook on midway highlight "When We Were Young". The sheer joy of hearing the guitarist back and fully committed to blink, giving his all to the style of music that was his first love, is more than worth the price of admission here.
Kicked off by the "Always"-nodding synthpop "Blink Wave", Hoppus takes the reins for a more experimental back half where the album really comes to life. Anyone with a Defend Pop-Punk sticker buried deep in the drawer will go absolutely hogwild to the steam train that is "Bad News", while the destined-to-be-underrated "Other Side" fills that classic penultimate Hoppus spot with a touching dedication to his late bass tech, Robert Ortiz - a nice reminder that the bassist's low-key contributions, the likes of "Wendy Clear" and "Here's Your Letter", were always the heart of their respective albums. He even brings back some of that +44 magic to the time signature-shifting monster "Turpentine" - "generation lost and forgotten, clawing at the lid of the coffin, your god ain't coming back this time" - inbetween choruses where DeLonge politely tells the listener "stick your dick in Ovaltine" and other dubious words of wisdom. But it's the dark "You Don't Know What You've Got", which marries the "Adam's Song" riff to some even more heartwrenching lyrics this time around, that deals directly with Hoppus' fight with cancer with a bluntness that's both uncomfortable and all the more powerful for being housed in a blink-182 album.
Really my first instinct is just to describe
One More Time as "astonishingly good", and I've sold it that way to several friends and family members to get them to listen, but there's fumbles here that can't be overlooked. The most egregious is the absolutely turgid "Fell in Love". This would already be one of the worst blink songs ever with its AI-generated vocal lines (Hoppus' "it's craa-aaa-zy" has to be heard to be believed) and regurgitated production, but it crosses the line with an absolutely repellent opening which turns one of the greatest intros of all time, The Cure's snappy bassline hook for "Close to Me", into some royalty-free ad music jingle bullshit. It's a real wonder how this slop ever made the cut, although everything from the song's family-friendly hook to the 2:18 length screams TikTok-bait, it's an instant skip for anyone actually interested in good music. The same goes for the two obligatory-feeling, not outright-bad short tracks: "Turn This Off!" is trying a little hard to fill the "Happy Holidays You Bastard" slot without any of the spontaneous fun, while "Fuck Face" is a throwaway from an EP Barker recorded with Rancid's Tim Armstrong, a distorted 30 seconds of Travis and Tom screaming at one another that's a lot less entertaining than it sounds on paper. That these missteps only take up about three minutes of the album's total runtime is a promising sign, especially for a band which seemed to lose the art of the album format after the devastating death of genre figurehead Jerry Finn. There's more here one could criticise, from the compressed, suffocating mix that makes Finn's absence sting all the more, to lyrics that run the gamut from lazy to just unreal (tell me "let's search and destroy all the innocent throats we can step on" wasn't written by a chatbot trained on Hoppus lines). But we don't expect perfection from blink-182, folks: we just want them to once again walk that impossible tightrope they used to balance on effortlessly, to deliver summery pop-punk bangers and dark experiments in the same breath, to crowbar catchy hooks into our heads for days while also making us feel with the heavier lyricism that made
Untitled the best album in this genre.
One More Time does not consistently find this balance, but it does enough to make the moments when it falls off hard emphatically worth sitting through.
The temptation to read this album, the sheer unlikely existence of it, as a kind of therapy for Hoppus is strong; especially upon hearing in the Lowe interview that DeLonge, himself a survivor of skin cancer, was a strong positive voice for the bassist throughout his chemotherapy and recovery afterwards. It'd be a mistake to ascribe too much of the album to this interpretation, but it's a nice way to frame an album that deals so frankly in rekindled friendships and getting older, as something supportive and healing for all three men instead of an empty exercise in nostalgia. "blink was always a way to force happiness in the room […] we were trying to make up for a troubled youth", DeLonge says in the same interview. As the final strains of "Childhood" ring out, and the last question of the album is asked ("where did our childhood go, I wanna know?") blink does a very unusual thing for them, and lets the instruments tell a story the vocalists can't quite put into words. Like a modern version of that massive double drum outro on "I'm Lost Without You", the coda of "Childhood" lets the drummer cook over a synth patch that sounds ripped straight from an old NES system. It's a bizarrely moving moment, nostalgic and silly and devastating all at once; you can almost hear Barker's over-compressed, loud-as-shit drums as the sound of adult responsibility, taxes, midlife crises and all the rest crashing in over a sound that represents childhood in its simplest, purest form. Where'd our childhoods go? Shit, they're right here, back where they belong in the hands of a band who could always capture them more effortlessly than any of their peers, and they're back to writing the kind of anthems that make us feel like that last summer as a kid will always last forever.
