Great post totally agree. I appreciate the work put into Neighborhoods. I can look at each song and appreciate what the goal was for it. Even If I am not a fan of every song I have the glass half full mind set when looking at each one individually. I feel like the nay sayers have that glass half empty mind set when reviewing Neighborhoods.
Or it's just incredibly blatant that, for the first time in the band's history, they didn't write the songs together. That, coupled with really poorly written lyrics for the latter half of the album, makes it less enjoyable as their past albums. I don't expect you to argue those points though because you're a knob.
I agree the lack of collaboration hurt the album, and that the best tracks are the ones they did together imo. I don't know about the lyrics being poorly written, probably not up to par with the lyrics of untitled but better than a lot of other work. The lyrics had good things to say that I could relate to in some way and that's what really counts for me when I'm listening. While I will say that untitled had some beautiful lyrics, blink has had some poorly written lyrics before on all of the albums, especially the earlier stuff, but I still love those songs for what they're saying. Also we can just be thankful that tom wrote far better lyrics on Neighborhoods than anything on Love pt 2, some of that stuff made me cringe.