Everyone Will Listen Even if it Hurts Sometimes

Last year, around the time U2 was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I began to wonder why, after twenty-five years of being one of, if not the best band in the world, the band hadn’t spawned a new generation of U2-wannabes. Even newer, and lesser bands such as Green Day and Nirvana have inspired many of the bands of today, but there still are not any new U2’s with only Snow Patrol comes to mind. Well there is now a band, that comes from a surprising source, openly hoping to be the next U2 and that would be former Blink182 guitarist, Tom Delonge’s new band Angels and Airwaves.

Yes, a member of a band best known for being naked in their videos and sodomy jokes in their songs has grown up and there is not a one fart joke on the group’s debut, We Don’t Need to Whisper. Instead the album focuses on the seriousness of relationship something Blink182 had already been moving towards on later albums. But the songs here do lack the faith overtones that seem to soak into a lot of the U2 catalogue.

So if there is a comparison to U2, it would be sonically where Angels and Airwaves builds a wall of sound opposed to heavily relying on the drummer as Blink182 did. The opener, Valkyrie Missile builds up to a crescendo and takes it’s time tapering off at the end much like Where the Streets Have no Name. Well so does The Adventure which highlights the problem with the album, diversity. Most of the songs blend into each other, not noticing where one ends and the next one begins even with spacing in-between and the songs themselves, all of which clock in at over four minutes seem to drag on. Also the choruses of It Hurts and Distraction get old real quick.

It’s a novel idea trying to copy the style of the best band of my generation, but at the end of the day, it still sounds like the dude from Blink182. And the rest of the band, made up of Dave Kennedy of Delonge’s other side project Box Car Racer, Ryan Sinn, formally of The Distillers, and Atom Willard, who has drummed for Rocket from the Crypt and The Offspring, just are not close to the musicianship of The Edge, Adam and Larry, nor have the history the close friends had even before starting U2 with Bono. But at least Angels and Airwaves haven’t run naked through a video yet or uttered a fart joke.

Song to Download - The Adventure

We Don’t Need to Whisper gets a on my Terror Alert Scale.