blink-182

blink-182

A’M/ Geffen

Is blink-182 growing up? The punk-popsters have made a career out of acting like the world’s most overgrown kids. A typical blink album comes off like the soundtrack to a pubescent youth, rife as they are with masturbation jokes and sniggering references to naughty acts. This is a band in which sophistication meant naming albums with juvenile, straight-faced puns like “Enema of the State” and “Take Off Your Pants and Jacket.”

If the trio – guitarist/vocalist Tom DeLonge, bassist/vocalist Mark Hoppus and drummer Travis Barker – reveled in immaturity, their childishness often also revealed a heartfelt connection to the angst and foibles of youthful catastrophe. With their act-your-shoe-size-not-your-age credo, the band’s explorations of the horrors of adolescence – those feelings of awkwardness and loneliness, the wrenching pain of unrequited love, the nervousness of sexual awakening – hit a chord with legions of lost young kids who drove the group’s happy-go-lucky punk to platinum sales. That they did it by taking on the roles of giddy, clowning jesters only made them seem far less genuine than they actually were.

With “blink-182,” their sixth studio album, the band seems to opt for recapturing any kind of glory lost when they released “What’s My Age Again?” The rockers have decided to forgo the usual jokey title and silly sex gags for a more mature sound. They’ve even given the album the stark, spare trophy of a self-title, as if to say that this is what the band really is.

Since the guys are all either fathers and/or married, than this may just as well be who blink-182 actually is, because from the sounds of it, the band is taking steps forward into the harsh, unblinking realm of adulthood. “blink-182” isn’t the wacky experimental folly that some early buzz predicted, but it does show that the group is now able to keep its lewdness in check in favor of real emotional introspection.

Notions of romantic trouble still crop up in blink’s music; they haven’t exactly turned into a melodic politi-punk band a la Pennywise here. So why does the subject matter still turn to the realm of adolescence, it’s done with a far surlier and rougher edge to it. Older songs like “First Date” portray the lives of anxious young men unable to handle their feelings for the girls in their lives; here, the songs are coming at the tail end of broken hearts, steeped in anger, sadness and a deeper understanding of the intricacies of romance. As Hoppus whines on “Easy Target:” “let her slit my throat give her ammo if she’ll use it/ caution on the road lies, lies and hidden danger/ southern California’s breeding mommy’s little monster.”

The music in turn shows a stronger sense of complexity in the arrangements. The songs more often recall the “Jacket” track “Stay Together For The Kids,” the at-the-time atypical blink divorce song. The songs just seem … heavier, less sunny and bouncy than they did before. The group hasn’t sacrificed its knack for catchy hooks, as seen on songs like “Go” “Down” and “Feeling This.”

But those pop hooks, while still laying there right in the foreground, are also wrapped around heftier structures that propel the band away from the three-chord army that’s sprung up since the evolution of blink offspring Good Charlotte. The threesome has not shied away from adding in items not generally seen on the punk band shopping list. Keyboards and synthesizers surge and ripple on parts of the LP. The Cure’s Robert Smith gives the band cred by adding his aching moan to “All of This.” An elegant, minute-long spoken word intro opens “Stockholm Syndrome” and the instrumental “The Fallen Interlude” avoids rock altogether, pasting together spooky goth-hop beats over wilted vocals, into a pastiche that resembles a punk band trying to be Moby … and, surprise, it actually works. “Violence,” meanwhile, features the band talking in a pained murmur over the verses.

Barker’s splashy drumming churns throughout the album. This most underrated rock drummer pounds the skins with a walloping, kinetic abandon, and his full-throttle skill packs a sizable punch. The contrast between Hoppus’s plainspoken vocals, and DeLonge’s higher, more adenoidal voice has never produced a more comfortable trade off, with the two singers sliding easily into each other.

With this self-titled released, blink-182 have finally dropped the overgrown teenager act and made inroads into the alien world of maturity, and have discovered that they are all the better for it.