Angels & Airwaves
Love: Album Parts One & Two
(Liberator)
Not content just to bring his dark and newly grown-up preoccupations to the post-reunion Blink-182 album, singer-guitarist Tom DeLonge is still dreaming big with his interim act Angels & Airwaves. So big, in fact, that one album simply can’t contain him: the band have followed up last year’s free-download third LP
LOVE with a sequel. The two are now joined as a double-CD, not to mention tied in with a sci-fi film called
Love. (The second film to spring from the acronym-challenged AVA.)
Taken together, though, the albums become suddenly redundant. All but rewriting the same song well into infinity – which does befit all those outer-space fixations – DeLonge and company go through only minor variations of a formula that involves dippy lyrics, vague electronics, faux-Edge guitar and a radioactive level of ennui.
Less intergalactic pop-punk than soggy emo, AVA utilises former members of 30 Seconds to Mars, The Offspring and DeLonge’s previous sideband Box Car Racer to not so much break new ground as spin its wheels on an epic scale. And it’s all recorded by
someone named Critter.
Despite their staggered release, the two halves of
Love are tough to distinguish from each other. The first album leaned hard on synth-driven scope, Postal Service (or maybe Owl City?) signifiers and such pained pronouncements as
“We will see that we’re all connected.” Topped with DeLonge’s self-serious, over-enunciated croon, it rivalled 30 Seconds to Mars for overblown emo visions, albeit with quick detours into Snow Patrol balladry (‘Clever Love’) and doomsday ’80s (‘Hallucinations’). Suspending teen yearning in earthly orbit, Love emitted Hallmark-worthy slogans like
“We are all that we are / So terribly sorry” and
“We all are love and love is hard.”
Part Two is mostly more of the same:
“And there will be nothing left except sadness” and
“It’s well known that we have a fragile heart.” The “smash hit” single ‘Anxiety’ (see clip below) couples latter-day Green Day pretension with a mantra for Gen X and Y both:
“Don’t pressure us.” It so typifies this band that the 21 songs around it feel even more beside the point. That said, the power ballad ‘My Heroine (It’s Not Over)’ at least finds some grounding amid so much zero-gravity whinging. (‘Dry Your Eyes’ looks back on life and love as if floating above it all.) But this is still weak stuff: the dance-floor strobe of ‘The Revelator’ seems to single out
Achtung Baby specifically, for its U2 copycatting, while ‘Inertia’ indulges in M83-ish voice samples about life, man.
It all finishes with the requisite bombast. The guitar-synth combo of ‘Behold A Pale Horse’ nods to the immortal hook from Van Halen’s ‘Jump’, while the closing ‘All That We Are’ proceeds from heart-on-sleeve transmission to cresting climax.
Still, for all that by-the-numbers business, DeLonge and band stick to what will reach the back seats: Godzilla melodies, universal studies of misunderstood souls and the kind of emotional cues that ambush us from the background of TV shows. It may be ridiculous and over-the-top, but it’s not like he didn’t give us fair warning.
Doug Wallen
Angles & Airwaves - 'Anxiety'