Take Off Your Pants And Jacket

It’s easy not to like Blink-182. Even though all three band members are over 25, they still make jokes about Uranus and ‘beating meat’, write lyrics about ejaculating into socks and brandish tattoos and lip-rings as the essence of punkish cool. Worst of all, their detractors say, they don’t play serious music.

Well, actually, they do. And as a skate-punk Hamlet might adlib in some forthcoming Baz Luhrmann rock opera, there’s the rub, dude.

On their fourth studio album, the cringemakingly titled, Take Off Your Pants And Jacket, Blink-182 wield their instruments with consummate chutzpah and no little skill.

While they use the old punk template of the three minute fire cracker, they know that attitude won’t even scare their grannies anymore, so they don’t bother trying. Instead, they push their range to breaking point by offering up strong, direct narratives against their frenetic riffs that are by turns nostalgic and regretful (‘Please Take Me Home’), angry and cathartic (‘Stay Together For The Kids’) and plain dumb good fun (‘Happy Holidays, You Bastard’).

Like Ash, their melodies make them memorable and, like The Offspring, their humour sets them apart. Sometimes, though, Blink-182 do seem to feel their age a little, jumping from great teenage diatribes against their parents, dates and upstanding society to self-consciously old-fogeyish pleas that “kids will have fun and offend.”

The trio also probably wish that their best tunes lasted a little longer, judging by two band-on-auto-pilot fillers (‘Reckless Abandon’ and ‘Everytime I Look For You’) whose only purpose is to bring the album length up to the grand total of thirty-five minutes.

Still, with joyous choruses like the one in ‘Anthem Part Two’, bridges like the one in ‘Shut Up’ and such a surprisingly sincere (albeit potty-humoured) approach, Blink-182 will be around to annoy the naysayers for quite some time yet.

Pretty fly for three white guys.