blink-182
One More Time LP
‘This is our album cover’, blink-182 casually posts as the album we’ve been waiting in anticipation for finally arrives. And arrives it does – in style – with ‘Anthem Part 3’. Oh goodness, it’s a punk track but it brings shivers.
It continues with the party anthem, ‘Dance With Me’. The more you hear this song, the more it grows on you. It’s then straight to the jangly ‘Fell In Love’ with its great vocal dual pre-chorus.
The great tone of ‘Terrified’ is next. Buzzing guitars introduce the song, which heads through a great break into the first verse, which is reflective. The chorus cranks things up before things wrap around to the choppy break. The song is tight but conjures a feeling of chaos.
The emotive title track, ‘One More Time’, is next. This was definitely a tear-filled moment when the single dropped and it has all the impact of the first time I heard it. The selection of ‘More Than You Know’, with its piano intro, is a good way to transition back into the rest of the album.
‘Turn This Off!’ is a fast-paced Dude Ranch / Enema-style track, almost 25 seconds long and a direct call to switch off the record if you’re going to be offended by it. It’s followed by the opening motif of ‘When We Were Young’, which is a great song even before the lost-beat 7/8 chorus wakes you up. The stutter is cleverly undone for the final chorus, which switches it back to a conventional time signature.
It’s a full year since blink-182 released ‘Edging’. That’s how long we’ve been waiting for this long player! The song sits right in the middle of the track listing. And no, I’m not explaining that joke.
Top: We made this cover to compare with the official artwork (bottom). We wanted to show how sexy has no age.
The second half of the album begins with their recent single, ‘You Don’t Know What You’ve Got’. Suffice it to say that this album is still going strong at this point. It still is when ‘Blink Wave’ lands, and the throbbing rhythm and synth licks certainly deliver on the title’s promise. Along with the New Order synth the lead guitar lick hints at Robert Smith’s baritone guitar licks.
‘Bad News’ is a fast-paced track with a few surprises up its sleeve.
‘Hurt (Interlude)’ is a powerful track that is the song most like the style of Neighbourhoods. It has an epic beat and a pedalling piano note behind the music. It’s painfully short for such an awesome song – but ‘Turpentine’ soothes the loss with another really great song and one of the few with that noticeable line-ending delivery that was a signature of songs like ‘I Miss You’, and DeLonge even ends the song with a self-correction. Smiles all round.
The chaotic ‘Fuck Face’ (stylized as ‘F*ck Face’ to avoid offence, though I’m never sure why one is better than the other) is another sub-thirty-second blast, and then we’re onto ‘Other Side’, which name-checks Siouxie And The Banshees and (more subtly) The Cure. The song is a pop-rock anthem.
The intro to ‘Childhood’ adds a bit of a Beatles twist to the end of the album with a Mellotron style keyboard and a straight beat – you don’t often hear Travis Barker pop a bass and snare in 4/4 without adding a little magic.
In the reviews of the singles, we’ve noted the nods to previous works in these songs. Some are more overt, like ‘Anthem Part 3’ being the obvious continuation of the anthems, but there are more subtle references to ‘Adam’s Song’, ‘Stockholm Syndrom’, ‘Always’, ‘Obvious’, and more. It’s like the path forward could only be made by looking at where they came from – and I love that.
This is a great album from blink-182 and one we’ll all remember. I hope they give us some more in the future, too!
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Written by Fenton on
