Blink-182's California: NOT GOOD

This new blink-182 record... is NOT GOOD.

blink-182, they're still at it, going 25 years... weak. Especially on this new record over here, which features Matt Skiba of Alkaline Trio instead of Tom DeLonge. I mean, why would you want to do Angels & Airwaves when you could do this?

Now, personally, never been a gigantic fan of blink-182, like most people I enjoy Enema of the State and a lot of their earlier records, but (repeated four times) a lot of these pop punk and ska punk bands of thе 90s I think were a necеssity to sort of pull punk music out of the angry corner it painted itself into in the 80s. And they did with a strong sense of humour as well as introspection.

But at this point nearly all of blink-182's original appeal is pretty much gone. The closest this record comes to being funny is the song "Built This Pool", which is a 17-second-long song and its lone lyric is "I want to see some naked dudes, that's why I built this pool". A track that I think if you look it up in the Guinness Book of World Records is in there for the-the fastest cringe. The song "Brohemian Rhapsody" at the end of the record is second fastest.

The rest of this album's material is painfully sappy pep punk, like on the song "She's Out of Her Mind", which is this sickening troubled girl anthem: "Oh, she'so crazy, she's so psychothic, she's just so nutty, but I love her anyway!"; or the song "Kings of the Weekend", which is probably the most generic party anthem I've heard in a long time. Then we have softer cuts on here, which are overwrought with soft smooth range instrumentation, like on "Home Is Such a Lonely Place". I would rather listen to Green Day's "Time of Your Life". And I never want to hear Green Day's "Time of Your Life".

And then there's the production on this thing. The guitars are so squeaky-clean, lifeless, they're so touched up they might as well be a MIDI plug-in. And the vocals are just as squeaky clean, they have this robotically perfect pitch to them on one song after another, it's distracting. It's like I'm listening to the musical equivalent of-of airbrushing. The drums are the only thing on the mix that has any life or rawness to them, thank God Travis Barker can still actually perform really well.

Everything else on this album? The definition of overproduced and I think "Los Angeles" might have been the only chorus that I liked, except- you know, there are some filler "whoa, whoa". Not only on that song, but almost every other song on here. If I hear another "whoa, whoa", it's gonna be too soon.

And finally maybe the most glaring issue with this record is that I think in my head as I'm listening to this... "Aren't they too old for this shit?". But then I sort of check myself, because that's ageist, that's not really how I feel because there are bands from the same era as blink-182 who are still doing it and they still sound great. Namely, a band like Weezer, who still today, deep into their 40s, probably pushing 50, they sound like they're angsty, young, passionate teenagers who wrote the songs that were off of their first full-length record. So really the issue is-is not that blink-182 is too old for this shit, the thing is that they-they sound like they're too old for this shit.

Because seriously blink-182 no longer has that spunk, that sense of play, that rascally attitude that made them such an admirable band to begin with, even if they didn't have the angriest choruses and the most righteous songs and the most memorable punk anthems. What little they had going for them is either gone completely or it just didn't show up on this record at all.

Blink-182, "California", it's NOT GOOD. Tran-

-sition! Have you given this album a listern? Did you love, did you hate it, what would you rate it? You're the best, you're the best, what should I review next? Hit the like if you like,please susbcribe, please don't cry if you hate my point of view on this blink-182 record. Hope you're doing well, forever.