Album Review: Blink 182 "California"

0.5 out of 5

I hold Blink 182 surprisingly high considering that my history with their music is wishy washy at best. Like a lot of people my age they were that gateway band into bigger things. Their album 'Dude Ranch' introduced me to 90's Punk (and even to Mark Trombino of Drive Like Jehu) and made my soul crushingly awful Jr. High years somewhat livable. They acted as a kind of counterweight to the abysmal rise of Nu Metal in 1999, and at the same time taught me just what "selling out" meant. By the time their 2001 album "Take Off Your Pants And Jacket" released I had delved far enough into Punk and Indie music that I lost interest. Guitarist Tom Delonge recorded a serious album under the monicker Box Car Racer that culled influences from Post Hardcore groups like Jawbox, then the 2003 self titled album went deeper into those overly serious Emo waters, they broke up in 2005, and that was that.
Fast forward a decade and we've seen two side-projects (Angels & Airwaves, +44), a reunion, a reunion album ("Neighborhoods"), and another break up. As a band Blink 182 are the musical equivalent of a rich reality TV couple from New Jersey.
I'm an adult now with a diverse set of tastes and (as I'd like to think) a more mature outlook on life. Even though I miss the emotional highs and energy of youth, time has given me a deeper sense of the world and my place within it.
And that is where this album fails in every conceivable way.
Now sole frontman Mark Hoppus, the member who never wanted to experiment musically, has full reign to be as stunted as he wants to be. Throughout the jarringly long sixteen tracks Hoppus sings about teenagers falling in love, falling out of love, and occasionally being rebellious by doing so. If you wondered if he would address adulthood or his life as a middle aged father you'd be horribly wrong.
When I was younger I preferred the Hoppus penned songs because they were about the awkwardness of growing up. By comparison the yowling Tom Delonge was the more juvenile of the two who wrote songs about butt plugs and fucking dogs. Tom sang "Dysentery Gary", Mark sang "Dammit". Now though, I'm not so sure which of the pair are more immature.
Even though I think Delonges' later work in Blink and with A&A is/was melodramatic bullshit, at least he was trying to grow in any capacity at all. With this album Hoppus has firmly thrown down a gauntlet that assures fans that he will never ever grow up.
The songs here are forgettable at best and insulting at worst. The upbeat tracks are overproduced to the point that every fucking "Na Na Na" that fills every piece of empty space slices at your brain like the aural equivalent of Death By A Thousand Cuts. The ballads don't even register as low grade Emo; they're bad Pop Country without the twang.
The sentiments being expressed feel even more false once you learn that Hoppus employed every song writer he could find and only wrote about half the album himself. The two songs that do feel genuinely sincere are clearly the most insulting: the two individual minute long songs about watching naked dudes AND fingering eachother that actually leaves producer John Feldman's "is that really it?" in at the end of one of them. These two cuts more than any other feel the most honest about who Mark Hoppus is emotionally and where he's at as a fully grown adult human.
I'd like to go into new member Matt Skiba (Alkaline Trio) and his input but the truth is that it's minimal at best. He doesn't so much fill Delonges hole (see, we can all make gay jokes!) as much as he sits inconspicuously behind Hoppus in the hope that he will add credibility and not grab too much spotlight. His vocal presence rarely gets second billing and he acts mostly as a back up vocalist to fill out Hoppus, and his guitar playing mimics Delonges style just enough to not alienate wary fans but doesn't deviate so far from the norm as to threaten the formula Hoppus clings to like a flea on a rat on a sinking ship.
The album opens with an autotuned Hoppus singing "there's a cynical feeling saying that I should give up", the only problem is that the remaining album that follows is depressing proof that he ignored the best advice he ever gave himself.