By Peter Stroczkowski
Love II is both AvA’s fourth album and the final release in the Tom Delonge-led project’s ‘Love trilogy’ including the first Love album and the 2011 space-narrative film Love. With the release of Blink-182’s newest album just a few months ago, it is definitely a good year to be a Tom Delonge fan.
However, the typically potty-mouthed and nasally Blink guitar player most of us knew and loved is replaced here with an overly-philosophical, misguided, but equally nasally bastard child of Bono and Jared Leto.
Angels and Airwaves have always struggled with this weakness: although their music is beautifully textured, composed and performed, it is weighed down by contrived lyrics, repetitive and unoriginal vocal melodies, and a frontman ultimately more concerned with living up to his own hype than connecting with his listeners.
Opener ‘Saturday Love’ combines an intro worthy of being called the pop-punk genre’s ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ with Delonge’s uninspired crooning.
To be fair, the chorus is catchy, but the rest of the song bleeds together with the many other forgettable moments on the album. It is clear with the droning of synthesizers, the endless pitter-patter of lead guitar played through delay pedals and the attempted anthemic vocal arrangements that Delonge and the band want very much to create mood and atmosphere within the songs.
The problem is that the songs are almost entirely mood and atmosphere: airy, see-through and lacking substance. The lead single ‘Anxiety’ sounds nearly identical to the band’s older song ‘The Adventure’, while ‘Dry Your Eyes’ is a blatant rip-off of older single ‘Everything’s Magic’, which itself was a completely derivative of The Cure’s ‘Close to Me’ and Blink-182’s ‘Anthem Pt. 2’.
This is ultimately what is so frustrating about AvA’s music: there are plenty of good ideas but rather than hearing these ideas expanded upon, altered or dissected, the listener is fed either the same thing or practically the same thing over and over again, with Delonge’s strained voice sounding significantly weaker each time. For many fans of AvA’s music, this very well may be a plus. For everyone else, at least we can hope for another Blink-182 album.
