Yesterday, blink-182 released their new album California. A much anticipated record, it’s their first since ousting founding guitarist/vocalist Tom DeLonge. Early last year, the group announced the lineup change and welcomed Matt Skiba of Alkaline Trio as a third member. At a Blink show shortly thereafter, bassist Mark Hoppus introduced Skiba, then filling in on guitar, as our “new step dad that is going to be living with us from now on”. After years of ill-will amongst the band, it seemed the Hoppus-DeLonge divorce had finally gone through. Since joining, Skiba has racked up a good amount of performance time with the band and earned himself something of a warm welcome from the fanbase. He proved he could sing all the old songs and sound enough like DeLonge to keep with the sound, but add just enough of his own personality as to not come across as a carbon copy. The real test would be their record. It would definitively answer the question blink-182 fans had been posing since DeLonge left, “Who the fuck is Matt Skiba?”

The album opens with “Cynical”. In the anxiety-ridden open verse, Hoppus introspectively sings over clean guitar. Before listeners have time to wonder whether this slower pace is the new Blink, Skiba and drummer Travis Barker breakthrough. What comes next sound definitely like the band. There are all the elements you’d expect from Barker’s fills to the back-and-forth of Hoppus and Skiba trading off vocalist duties. What started as a questionable way to open a return record ends as a definitely high note. It’s followed by “Bored to Death”, which audiences heard pre-release as the song was the first single and thus the first listen of the band post-lineup change. It’s good, but mostly because it’s catchy and inoffensive. There’s nothing wrong with the track, just nothing really eye-catching, but what fix what isn’t broken? Perhaps these opens songs are Blink trying to prove that they can do Blink sans DeLonge. Without straight up re-writing “What’s My Age Again?” and the rest of Enema of the State, they’ve crafted songs similar enough to fit in with the rest of their discography. In essence prove that they’re still the same band. If they had written an album entirely different with Skiba at the helm, would it still be a Blink album or would it read more like a side project occupying time until things are patched over with DeLonge? In the past, Barker and Hoppus departed to form the short lived +44. They wrote good songs, but the group felt like a stopgap. Would the addition of Skiba read the same way or would he truly usher in a new age of Blink?

For now it seems they aren’t straying too far from the formula. This includes Blink’s trademarked song-about-a-girl, an example of which came next on the record. The band has written a series of memorable heroines/love interests/damsels in distress over the course of their career. Think “The Party Song” and “Going Away to College”. You could always invision who Hoppus and/or DeLonge was writing about in these instances. “She’s Out of Her Mind” is another establishing shot of such a character. With a “black skirt, black shirt, and Bauhaus stuck in her head” listeners get an increasingly clear picture of who the singer is “in deep” with.

For the song, Skiba and Hoppus continue to trade off vocalist roles, swapping parts at times instead of one just singing the chorus and the other the verse. Their voices pair nicely and form another strong track. Although diehard fans may find themselves missing the unmistakeable nasally whine of DeLonge’s parts in these opening tracks. In the past, so much of the band’s music relied on a call-and-response, trade-off model. Blink always had two definite singers. Hoppus was warmer, smoother, and overall of fewer words. DeLonge was worldly, sharp, and muddled on the vowels. Together, their voices formed a unique balance, best seen in songs like “Feelin’ This”. The problem with Skiba isn’t that he can’t sing, it’s that he doesn’t quite differentiate from Hoppus in the way DeLonge did. The two almost bleed together. “Los Angeles” is an example of this. Thematically and musically, the song is the most diverse on the record. The lyrics hint at an almost dystopian, post-apocalyptic future that leaves the listen feeling like Snake in “Escape from L.A.” This distracts from the fact that the vocals are uninteresting. So, is this the future of Blink? No more two-toned, duality?

No. Thankfully. I think? The following track, “Sober”, has Hoppus and Skiba at least attempting to separate their individual sounds from one another. Unfortunately, the song sounds like pop rock pandering for radio play. The track comes across as recycled. It’s something Five Seconds of Summer could’ve written. It just isn’t the caliber of song expected from Blink. The clap-like drums in the pre-chorus are ugly and the intermittent “na-na-na-na”s come across like lazy songwriting. If you look up the lyrics to Take Off Your Pants and Jacket’s “Online Songs”, you’ll find the chorus is simply, “And she said, / Na (x11) / ‘I just forgot you were there’” repeated three times. In writing it looks mind numbingly boring, but in fact it’s one of the most potent parts the band ever wrote. The track proves that the band is capable of making simple, sparse lyrics carry. “Sober” proves that they’ve lost that ability. Going forward, Blink should be allotted a strict number of woahs, ohs, and similar monosyllabic choruses. I won’t attribute this stumble solely to the departure of DeLonge, but one has to wonder if DeLonge took the lyrics and riffs with him with he left. If he did, what’s left? In order to figure that out, you have to look back and define what the band’s past efforts have been. What besides a shared microphone made up a Blink song?

For one thing, the jokes. Think back to the Mark, Tom and Travis Show and the immature, but lovable antics of the band’s younger years. They were a slew of Satan impersonations, dick jokes, and jabs at one another. The next track, “Built This Pool”, is :17 that seem grafted to the present from that era. In it, Hoppus sings, “I wanna see some naked dudes that why I built this pool.” The sentiment servers as a remind that the band is still jovial Blink. The band members may be full fledged adults and fathers, but they can still tell a dumb joke. Listeners can’t help, but crack a smile. These are the guys that titled one of their record Emenma of the State and ran butt naked through the entirely of a music video. It’s also interesting to note that the sound bite can definitely be attributed to Hoppus and Hoppus alone given that he played it years ago on his show “A Different Spin”, which he co-hosted who would’ve guessed it Amy Schumer.

If “Built This Pool” built back some of the faith and trust “Los Angeles” lost, “No Future” booted the record back down the ladder. Another one of the singles released prior to the album, it is ostensibly one of the songs the band definitely wanted us to hear. Not sure why. There is a flicker of hope when in the opening verse Barker is given a bit more space to do his thing. Then the chorus kicks in and there’s a disconnect. It sounds like two songs were stuck together with no mind paid to how awkwardly they’d clash when played together. The failure is surprising given that the band did this exact sort of stitching together of two ideas in the past for “Feelin’ This”. Hoppus and DeLonge separately wrote two songs that were then mashed together for the record. They fail to replicate this success this for “No Future”. The verses are strong, but the chorus is just not worth mentioning. Perhaps the most troubling characteristic of “No Future” is the fact that it made it onto the record. No one paused to think if it was their best work. Or worse they did pause and still thought well of “No Future”. Its existence raises the question, would anyone say ‘no’ to Mark Hoppus? He is the grandfather of the genre and a hugely respected member of the music community, so maybe not. Maybe he walked in with a passable demo and no one had the nerve to tell him “you can do better”? The song “No Future” sounds like Blink can get away with anything. They can slap elements of songs that individually sound good, but together sound like you’re channel surfing and call it a song and no one will question it.

by Zoe Marquedant