ALBUM REVIEW: One More Time… – Blink-182
You’ll have to forgive BLINK-182 fans for having mixed expectations here. Of course, there is no question that the trio of Travis Barker, Tom DeLonge and Mark Hoppus are behind probably the best and second best pop-punk albums of all time, and even everything they did after Enema Of The State and Take Off Your Pants And Jacket ranged from good to great. But it’s been a while hasn’t it? DeLonge’s been off chasing aliens or something – pausing a couple of times to release some of his best work with ANGELS & AIRWAVES – while the stuff that Barker and Hoppus did with Matt Skiba in the interim didn’t exactly add loads to the band’s ‘best of’ playlist. Add to this a set of singles that range from the excellent (More Than You Know) to the somewhat embarrassing (Edging) and One More Time… could go any way really.
One thing that was perhaps always guaranteed though was a heavy dose of nostalgia. The title track – another of the album’s many singles – is absolutely lathered in it; it’s a soft acoustic number and not entirely un-cheesy, but with lyrics like “it shouldn’t take a sickness or airplanes falling out the sky” in reference that which brought the trio back together both this time and the time before – and *that* music video to go with it – it becomes perhaps their biggest bottom lip-wobbler since I Miss You. Kicking off the record itself with a track called Anthem Part 3 feels similarly sentimental, its intro immediately comforting in the way it recalls its Part 2 predecessor from over two decades ago. It becomes a great track in its own right though – explosive and anthemic in all the ways one could ever really want BLINK-182 to be.
And there’s actually loads of that on One More Time… – perhaps even more than one might have expected at this juncture. More recent singles Dance With Me and Fell In Love keep the momentum nice and high off the back of the opener, while Terrified stands as an early highlight that feels like it fell off DeLonge and Barker’s 2002 full-length with BOX CAR RACER, which makes sense because that’s basically what happened. Elsewhere, the aforementioned More Than You Know would’ve fit right in on 2003’s Untitled, and even Edging works better when it doesn’t have to measure up to the weight of a decade of expectation by itself, this following hot on the heels of another gigantic sing-along in When We Were Young.
But, of course, One More Time… isn’t perfect and realistically no-one was expecting it to be. The main issue is length, with 17 tracks and 45 minutes proving just a little too much as later efforts like Bad News and Other Side end up being perfectly fine if not much else. There is some variation in the midst of this like the synthy CURE worship of Blink Wave or the super AVA-coded Hurt (Interlude) or the almost-hardcore of Fuck Face, but it definitely feels like all the biggest highlights are in the first half. Childhood also isn’t really the great closer the album needs, feeling a little damp at the end of a record that is generally best at its most energetic.
Overall though, One More Time… is probably BLINK-182’s best album since Untitled, which – to emphasise – came out 20 years ago. Obviously nostalgia is doing a lot here and maybe it won’t knock something like the recent KOYO record out of the heavy rotation of a younger pop-punk fan, but there are literally millions of people who will be so happy to have the quintessential BLINK line-up back together, and not only that but releasing an album that hits far more often than it misses. If it really is just One More Time then they’ve done it in style, but based on the many highs of this record it seems that they may well have more in them yet.
Rating: 8/10
One More Time is out now via Columbia Records.
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