Blink-182
Take Off Your Pants and Jacket
- MCA
If you can get beyond Blink-182's utterly sophomoric and undeniably moronic side—which admittedly is not always easy—it's a scorching, punk-powered outfit, packin' hooks a-plenty into three-minute blasts of raging glory.
The band comes out with guns-a-blazin' here, searching for its own version of The Who's “My Generation” in the appropriately-titled album opener “Anthem Part Two.” Since an obscenity rips through the heart of the chorus, it's also as close to a workable title as they could get, but there's no denying the intent of the lyrics:
“Let this train-wreck burn more slowly/Kids are victims in this story/Drown the youth with useless warnings/teenage rules they're …… and boring.”
Set against a slamming power surge, it's one of the best us-against-them teenage anthems to come along in years, perfectly capturing the raw and reckless energy of youth gone wild.
It's also not the only great song on the disc, which boasts a series of fully fueled gems, including “Online Songs,” the radio-friendly “The Rock Show,” and “Please Take Me Home,” which sounds like a second cousin to the band's 1999 breakthrough hit “All the Small Things.”
Still, for every time the throttling trio leaves a listener wide-eyed in wonder, the band comes back with twice as many deliberately idiotic lyrics designed to appeal to smirking lowlifes coast to coast. And based on the band's prior track record, you can bet the formula will work.
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