On the advice of reader Michael, I decided to follow up yesterday’s post on +44 with a look at the first album from the OTHER post-blink 182 band, Tom DeLonge’s Angels and Airwaves.
Tom’s contribution to Blink 182 was his songwriting (especially on the band’s stellar final album), a strength which comes through better than usual on We Don’t Need to Whisper. Like many others, my first encounter with AvA was “The Adventure” which struck every right chord lyrically as it came out a few short weeks before graduating high school. Overall We Don’t Need to Whisper excels at making statements meant to touch the masses. “Do It For Me Now” took the dying relationship motif and exploded it to U2-level proportions, while “It Hurts”, the closest song this album has to a Blink 182 track, turns infidelity into a galactic crisis. Indeed, Angels and Airwaves gave Tom DeLonge a chance to explore the reaches of his talent more than anything with Blink did.
That said, DeLonge’s desires to both be taken seriously as an artist and reach every soul in the galaxy with his music are the album’s undoing. Songs here that could easily be powerful and memorable three-to-four minute pieces get stretched and dragged to five and six minutes, and with nothing anchoring them down and keeping them moving, We Don’t Need To Whisper becomes an increasingly difficult listen as it progresses. So give Tom DeLonge credit for some brilliant writing, but at the end of the day We Don’t Need To Whisper might have worked better as a book of poetry than it did an album.
Angels and Airwaves – The Adventure [iTunes]
==TJ==
Filed under: Album A Day | Tagged: Album A Day, Angels and Airwaves, Blink 182
