Regarding why I chose this as the day’s album: My external hard drive randomly decided to change it’s location from being the E: drive to the F: drive while I was doing stuff with my new digital camera. After trying to finagle the iTunes XML file to reflect this change with no success, I said ’screw it’, and just let iTunes relocate all the songs. This meant that all my play counts, playlists and such were wiped clean. So I now had no idea what hadn’t been played in awhile or anything of that nature. As such I decided to just play the first full album on my computer, which just so happened to be +44’s first (and likely only) release.
+44 is much like the other post-Blink 182 project Angels & Airwaves in that both showed off the strengths of the individual members (Tom DeLonge’s songwriting for AvA, Travis Barker’s existence for +44), while also underscoring why the former trio needed each other. Angels & Airwaves may have had beautiful lyrics, but the music never really gelled with the lyrics, and the result was lovely poetry behind atmospheric droning. Likewise, +44 wrote great pop-punk songs that were easy to follow and fairly fun, but with a few exceptions Mark Hoppus’s lyrics are fairly pedestrian. Both projects saw middling success and were critically bashed, leading many to hope for a Blink 182 reunion. Thanks to a near-death experience from Travis Barker, 2008 saw the first glimmers of hope. In all likelihood neither +44 or AvA will release another record (Hoppus and Barker recently admitted to being focused on their own solo albums, and DeLonge hasn’t been heard from since I-Empire), leaving the combined three albums behind as proof that Tom, Mark and Travis are only as good as the sum of their parts.
+44 – 155 [iTunes]
+44 – Baby, Come On [iTunes]
==TJ==
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: +44, Album A Day, Blink 182
I’m psyched to see that this is your album of the day, because I was just thinking of this album. I had a pretty good love/hate relationship with Blink 182 back in the day, and so my relationship with both AvA and +44 was complicated at best. But I think I finally figured that I liked +44 better. It just seemed…I don’t know…more pop-y. More catchy? And so, when I was reading this, I thought that you were going to like it a lot. Interested to see if you do AvA anytime soon to get a contrast. Thanks for the good stuff.