AVA 'Love' Album Review
Tom DeLonge must have a chip on his shoulder about the size of the moon. After working his ass off in Blink 182 to earn himself the title of America's most immature rocker, he's spent the past half decade trying to counter that claim: Blink's final album veered off into a world where radical (at least for mall-punk) song structures were confused with maturity. After that band's demise, he's spent piles of time and his record label's money trying to prove with Angels and Airwaves that he's a legitimate, thinking and mature artist.
Love, Angels and Airwaves' third, is just that latest chapter in DeLonge's attempt to chuck his Peter Pan reputation and become a legit, awe-inspiring artist. Like the two albums before it -- and possibly even more so -- Love fails. It fails miserably. Instead of trading Peter Pan for Socrates, he becomes nothing more than Peter Pan's pale, misguided impression of the wizened philosopher: He probably thinks he's breaking some seriously heavy ground, but, really confusing Love with maturity or artistically valid songwriting just shows how immature the singer/songwriter is at heart.
Sure, the arena-rock/space-jams hybrid and its painfully belabored insights are going to be praised, but that praise will only come from the types who proclaim Avatar as deep, the Kardashians as the world's sexiest style mavens and Dane Cook the epitome of comedic sophistication. Love is painfully, forcefully and misguidedly ambitious, but that never translates into real maturity, and anyone with a lick of sense should be able to spot that a mile away.
Come in any closer than that and it's blindingly obvious DeLonge is once again in over his head. Love opens with "Et Ducit Mundum Per Luce" -- which roughly translated means "he leads the world with light" -- as DeLonge gets wrapped up in plodding, pseudo-grandiose space-rock instrumentation set to tape simply to stoke the fires of his own self-importance. From there, it's typical Angels and Airwaves, dressing douche-rock up as high art: "Letters to God, Part II" is, at its heart, nothing more than a punk songwriter overextending his capabilities, but its over-arranged, over-produced presentation attempts to lend it weight. "Hallucinations" dabbles with expansive space-rock guitars, though it's produced so cleanly, so inexpertly that it sounds hollow, thin and calls attention to just how little Angels and Airwaves has going on behind the scenes. "Shove" and "Soul Survivor" are clunky ambient-rock numbers that echo Angels and Airwaves' past couple albums.
Somebody somewhere needs to sit down with DeLonge and give him a great big hug, and tell him everything will eventually work out for him. Until it does, stop just stop playing at this pseudo-maturity thing, OK?
(Suport From Modlife, in AVA FOR LIFE)
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