Since their last full album as a trio, 2011’s Neighborhoods, the most perceptible shift in the Blink-182 dynamic has been the emergence of Barker as a pop-punk svengali, paving the rap-to-rock pipeline for artists like Lil Huddy and Machine Gun Kelly. His overstuffed, cheap-thrills approach to production—starting with drum fills that occupy every inch of breathable air—has seeped into Blink-182’s empty hooks. “Dance With Me” (after Tom’s intro, which made me miss the days of old Blink) channels Machine Gun Kelly’s unrelenting onslaught of guitars and nasal screeching. Whereas previous albums were primarily written by the band members, ONE MORE TIME… adds a bevy of songwriters, including Kelly collaborator Nick Long and OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder. It feels disjointed and bloated, not to mention heavily indebted to the band members’ existing discography. “Terrified,” originally written for Barker and DeLonge’s side project Box Car Racer, is almost identical to the sound of that band’s biggest hit, “I Feel So.” “You Don’t Know What You’ve Got” strips the haunting guitar riff from “Adam’s Song” for parts, just different enough that you might miss it at first. When they run out of their own material, they turn to their inspirations: The cloying “Fell in Love” opens with a synth line based on an interpolation of the Cure’s “Close to Me,” which could have felt inspired if it didn’t force such unflattering comparisons to the old Blink song actually featuring Robert Smith, 2003’s sparse and subtle “All of This.”
The Blink lore-as-lyric bottoms out with “One More Time,” a maudlin ballad that addresses head-on Hoppus’ battle with cancer and Barker’s near-fatal plane crash in 2008, crises that eventually led the trio to reconnect. “It shouldn’t take a sickness/Or airplanes falling out the sky,” Hoppus sings. The story is one of enduring friendship, reduced to vacuous balladry that reads like a high school poetry assignment. But it’s the third verse that determines how you’ll likely feel about Blink’s latest dispatch: If the thought of Mark and Tom harmonizing “I miss you” in obvious homage to their massive 2004 single seems charming, then by all means, let them serenade you back to the George W. Bush era. Such a bald reference softens the blow of having to learn new lyrics and chords, both for fans and the band. But if it sounds self-congratulatory, like a band doing cheap covers of its own songs, the rest of the album is unlikely to convince you otherwise. “Edging,” the Dropkick Murphys-esque single named for the sexual practice of which Barker is an avowed fan, rips a lyric practically wholesale from DeLonge’s other band Angels and Airwaves. To fans who’ve followed Blink-182’s side projects over the years, the similarities are almost offensive, as if those albums were merely practice for their eventual return.
