Blink-182’s One More Time…: The Best It Could Have Been
Blink-182 might be one of the easiest targets for bands to group into the whole “[washed-up punk band]” that “[peaked in the 90s to early 00s]”—look no further than them headlining the most recent When We Were Young festival alongside equally-”washed-up” contemporaries. Interestingly enough, the past decade or so hasn’t exactly been what you might expect of a band of that calibre: Compared to, say, Green Day, who were just consistently putting out incredibly subpar music, Blink were not only putting out subpar music, but were also in some of the most, simply put, cursed predicaments a punk band could find themselves in. Just conjure up the idea of Blink touring with Alkaline Trio’s Matt Skiba to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the arguable magnum opus of pop-punk juvenilia (Enema of the State) while one of said album’s songwriters was out and about looking into aliens existing… or something.
As the most popular iteration of the Blink trio (Mark, Tom, and Travis) come together once again, it’s worth remembering that 2011’s Neighborhoods was the first time this trio would reunite, and even if it arguably spawned some of the most off-kilter but mildly underrated material of the group’s career, it was hard to get past all the tension during that album’s recording process and the latter end of its touring cycle. Then came the infamous Skiba era, which enough has been said of (good and bad), though, the arguable worst thing that this era brought about was not Blink’s incredibly asinine music, but them unintentionally leading on a slew of clueless pop-punk kids into thinking that Skiba couldn’t write for shit—it’s still weird to think that Alkaline Trio put out one of the best records of their career (Is This Thing Cursed?—fitting title, by the way) sandwiched between California and Nine.
Presently, on One More Time…, aside from a much more vivid sense of camaraderie and unadulterated friendly collaboration, there’s supposedly a recalibration in ethos as the band would frequently lament on their excellent Zane Lowe interview. As a band that grew out of the more “violent” side of the punk scene, Blink would come to function as an antithesis to that and “[force happiness, play fast, have edge, just “attack” on all fronts],” and a lot of that arguably comes back on here, even while maintaining the ability to (try to) be “serious” for some moments. There’s also now supposedly more of an emphasis on writing about moments that matter (more) to the group; to create material banking on the group’s chemistry and real-life experiences—a key point they made was not conflating what the fans want with what artists would want. (Let’s completely ignore that you could infer from this statement that this, for some reason, wasn’t done—at least to the same degree—on previous records.)
You definitely get doses of that, starting with the opener Anthem Part Three: An excellent and triumphant mission statement that details the group’s perseverance and non-complacency despite “no one [giving] a fuck that you died”—sure, a bit corny and pander-y for Blink, but it’s certainly a breath of fresh air after the past few years of pretty stale narrative chops. The most prominent gut-wrenchers turn up on “key” (emphasis on the quotation marks) tracks like One More Time and You Don’t Know What You’ve Got, which both detail some of the near-fatal experiences that were uncanny but pivotal springboards in getting the trio back together, including Travis Barker’s plane crash and Mark Hoppus’ lymphoma diagnosis (“I wish they told us, it shouldn’t take a sickness or airplanes falling out of the sky”) which both have thankfully recovered from. Again, perhaps a bit on-the-nose, but not necessarily out of line with some of Blink’s more emotionally-charged tracks (a la Adam’s Song or Stay Together for the Kids).
Though, that pretty much sums up the narrative highlights One More Time… has to offer. There’s still a lot of cutesy little moments on tracks like Other Side (which is endearing whether read as a lament on Tom’s absence or about the passing of Hoppus’ longtime bass tech) or more overtly-nostalgic tracks like When We Were Young and Childhood, but the rest of it just dabbles in the usual Blink shtick for better and worse. “Better” in that it’s easy enough to just look past the pretty schmaltzy and juvenile laments on love (e.g. Bad News, Dance With Me) or generally vague down-trodden elegies (e.g. Terrified, More Than You Know) to allow a clearer focus on other aspects of a track; “worse” in that some of these tracks start to incite the same kinds of suspicions of (lyrical) arrested development akin to groups like Weezer or Simple Plan (e.g. Turn This Off!, Edging) and while, sure, that is a Blink “thing,” it’s probably not the most gratifying to hear at this point.
Narrative consistency and “remarkability” hasn’t really been Blink’s strongest suit (aside from, perhaps, their 2003 record), but there’s always at least some kind of thread linking most tracks together under a central “theme,” and One More Time… gets that across on a very general level. Everything links back in some way to the trio’s camaraderie and experiences, and while they don’t quite scratch those itches in the same way Enema of the State or Take Off Your Pants and Jacket would, a Blink project scratching those itches past a very rudimentary state is already more than can be said about Blink’s material even dating back to Neighborhoods. Even then, regardless of how datedly juvenile, directionless, and perhaps cringe-inducing some lines may end up being (no, I will not “stick [my] dick in Ovaltine” or “snort a bag of dramamine,” thank you very much), you can at least feel a lot more “sentiment” from it—it’s quite hard to mask that the trio are in a much better place than before.
Blink usually make up for their less-gratifying narratives by supplementing them with some pretty “basic” though high-octane and emotionally-charged songwriting chops (come on, regardless of how juvenile Enema may seem, you can’t deny its position in the pop-punk canon). Twenty or so years later, you wouldn’t really expect them to be able to suddenly top their best work (as based on the very reasonable inference that very few groups in the same predicament could/would), but, at the very least, One More Time…’s best-performed and produced tracks are undoubtedly the best that the group seem to be capable of at this junction in their career, which isn’t to say they’re no longer enjoyable, they’re just not as well-crafted as tracks from their prime. Other listeners would have estimated this record to be a reminder of why groups in Blink’s ilk are so frequently subjected to forms of “[they fell off]” discourse, and you definitely get a plentiful amount of moments like that.
To preface a dissection of the production, a little tangent about the album’s mixing and mastering: It’s bad. Regardless of intent or how they “aid” the tracks (they don’t), it’s fatiguing at the eardrum level with a combination of dynamic range compression and piss-poor mastering that somehow manages to be more inconsistent than John Feldmann’s handling of California and Nine. Some tracks are just in line with what you’d expect an aging pop-punk group to do (Anthem Part Three, Bad News); others reek of immense instrumental imbalance, where some stems sometimes feel too loud and others needing just a tad bit more bite in the mix (More Than You Know, Blink Wave); a whole segment of the track-list feels way too polished and unintentionally feels like an attempt to remove any single fragment of sentimentality (Hurt, One More Time); the rest sound unfinished and were in dire need of a remaster the moment they were exported, case in point, the album’s lead single: Edging.
(Bad mixing/mastering isn’t unique to Blink—as other popular artists/releases would indicate—though, I would like to hope that it opens up avenues for discussions in this ilk to be more validated amidst more circlejerk-y communities and not be trapped to uninformed echo chambers like the Blink-182 subreddit.)
Blink do the usual routine of taking on a pretty milquetoast pop-punk sound and giving it a revitalized life—think tracks like the meteoric opener Anthem Part Three, which has more adjacency with Part Two than its cousin from Enema, but feels every bit as poignant despite the 22-year gap between them. It’s filled with the kind of raw and exuberant energy of Take Off’s best moments, while also channeling a bit of maturity as previously noted with the song’s narrative. Coincidentally, a good chunk of One More Time…’s more standout tracks are crafted with what appears to be a similarly-shaped spark, such as Bad News or Blink Wave: The former is just a pure, fiery banger with some of the catchiest melodies and riffs you’ll get from the group. It’s closely comparable to California-era tracks like The Only Thing That Matters, but with a lot more of that classic Blink pizazz. The latter is just Blink doing new wave clichés. Derivative, yes, but there’s a good enough foundation to carry the track.
The two sub-30 second tracks are also pretty fun: Turn This Off! sounds like an attempt at an over-produced NOFX track for shits and giggles but never really overstays its welcome. Fuck Face sounds like it belongs on a completely different record, but it’s just a dumb-fun rager that thrives off its own lack of conclusiveness. Elsewhere, some more typical pop-punk bangers in that vein populate the track-list, taking off with varying degrees of success. Dance With Me takes a bit more of an angsty approach to its mood, and will either be saved or ruined by the incessant olé-olé-olé refrain, though, it’s still one of the more tastefully-crafted tracks here. Other Side and When We Were Young are as generic as you can get for pop-punk pastiche; these tracks seesaw between ripping themselves or another stylistically-adjacent band off, but, if you’ve listened to enough music in this style to grow a tolerance for pinnacles of nothing-special-ness, these tracks might just be up your alley.
Some tracks opt for a moodier approach, though with a tendency to slip into directionless, overbearing melodrama: Turpentine is a prime example of this, and while it does seem to fire on all cylinders on a performance front, that aim never really seems to hit anywhere in a satisfactory manner. Equating it to a track like Feeling This feels like an insult to that track. On the note of parallelisms with past Blink work, Terrified seems to be some kind of Box Car Racer offshoot, but, again, it doesn’t ever really feel like it goes anywhere with its rather barebones production and structure. You Don’t Know What You’ve Got is definitely a bit repetitive and simplistic with how it portrays its subject matter (i.e. Hoppus’ cancer), but it’s saved by a more tasteful melody and dynamic between DeLonge and Hoppus’ performances. Similar sentiments could be leveled at the brooding yet immensely catchy More Than You Know, but with more quickfire aggression and unfiltered bitterness.
The rest of the album’s excursions are pretty bonkers wild, and not for the better. Fell in Love is the album’s signature peppy love song, though it has to be noted for its best feature being that it reminds listeners of a much better song, and its worst feature being that it somehow manages to lower the bar of quality for Blink love songs from Skiba-era tracks like She’s Out of Her Mind. Edging is just… weird and kitschy, but doesn’t really use that quality to its advantage and flaunts it (alongside all its very apparent engineering errors) like a charm. Childhood is certainly a nostalgic but iffy way to conclude the mission statement set by Anthem Part Three, especially with it being a somewhat sluggish track that feels like it either amalgamates or rips off too many influences while also literally ending with a fizzled, 8-bit outro is certainly a unique creative decision to make.
Harkening back to the Zane Lowe interview, there were numerous allusions to One More Time… being Blink’s “best” record, and while it’s incredibly easy to dismiss this statement as simply being derivatives of “wrong,” it’s not entirely incorrect. It may have a bit more maturity, grit, and polish than Enema or Take Off; it may have more of a spunky, carefree spirit than their 2003 record; but, honestly, we’re just picking and choosing things to compare. That trilogy of records still runs circles around the overall experience provided by One More Time…; you just get a much higher concentration of unadulterated pop-punk fun (as best as it can be put, honestly) and emotionally-charged bangers on these records, not even owing to those records’ production and mastering issues being nowhere near as as severe as they are on this new record.
However, what came of the Mark, Tom, and Travis show at this junction is, to reiterate an earlier point, really the best that they look to be capable of at this point in their career; if anything, it surpasses tenfold the expectations that might have been set by the Skiba era (at least, based on Mark’s and Travis’ performances). The sort of carefree and fun-loving Blink “spirit” returns in full force on this record, and, again, while that may be to its detriment at times, it helps solidify this record as the most undeniably “Blink” record in years. There’s definitely more of an argument for projects like Neighborhoods being more technically proficient and “better” in some regards, but even then, that still felt less like a Blink record and more like a poor (or, dare I say, rich) man’s Angels & Airwaves.
One More Time…, for all its faults, feels the most like a “passion project” from the trio, if you will: It’s definitely something that tries to solidify the identity and personality Mark, Tom, and Travis have crafted for themselves since their initial explosion in popularity during the late 90s. Even this record’s most awkward and janky tracks still feel more “comfortable” compared to much of the Skiba era (and you probably could chalk this up to Skiba not having the same level of “comfort” as Tom with direct, interactive songwriting with Mark and Travis). Again, camaraderie; friendly collaboration; these are cornerstones in carrying much of this album’s best moments while also being a teeny little saving grace for the occasional musical crimes against humanity. Where the record stumbles on that holistic front is that, with the multifaceted nature of the Blink ethos, along with all the contextual turmoil leading up to the release of this record, it feels like it tries too many things and succeeds at a select few, with absolutely no surprises as to what they’re most at home with, and a handful too many moments that reek of having needed more time to simmer.
Though, even if One More Time… is a success with a lot of its theoretical and sentimental features, the fact still remains that it remains a somewhat shoddy and janky project for the group: A little too many potholes and inexcusable engineering errors, with a handful of pretty tasteful and wonderfully spunky tracks that showcase that the group still have it in them… to an extent. With all the contextual build-up to this record (mostly owing to a sort of “recovery” from the Skiba era), a lot of these tracks, while filled with a similar sense of spiritedness that carried Blink in their prime, can sometimes feel a bit lost and undercooked at this point in their careers. Given enough time, perhaps there’s still some semblance of hope that Mark, Tom, and Travis would be able to more consistently recontextualize that spirit into something more appropriate, palatable, and ultimately, consistent for this day and age.
RECOMMENDED TRACKS: Anthem Part Three, More Than You Know, Blink Wave, Bad News
2023/12/08
Originally published at https://www.tumblr.com on December 8, 2023.
