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Nine Criticisms.


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50 minutes ago, boxelder said:

objectively, this:

Now I'm looking back at the city
The one that they say never sleeps
How things get so dark and shitty
Sunrise always gives us the creeps

is lazy.  it’s clunky and feels like a placeholder 

Show me the majority of any albums from bands in this genre, and others and blink in general and I will show you parts that are this lazy and clunky lyrics wise, while also a bunch of raw, real, good lyrics as well. 

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I think Mark has started to become a storyteller and not a character in the story. He always used to write about himself but if we want to believe he has a songwriter block, then it's good for him to write about something else. He's pushing 50 and he's living a good life, at some point you run out of ideas and you don't have to feel like your life has to be super interesting to write stuffs. I'm not justifying lazy lyrics, especially from Mark who is known as an avid reader, he meets plenty of people, sees so many different places etc. but at the end of the day he writes for an audience of presumably normal people, so you have to write something people can relate to. People who blatantly write about how interesting their life is, probably lie about their exploits, if it makes a good song.

I love Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen and even they are/were mostly storytellers, but I don't expect that level of committment from Mark haha his lyrics have improved from California, they aren't stellar but it's still blink-182. (Those lyrics in On Some Emo Shit are kinda cringy but they still sound good when you listen to them and I can accept them.)

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a criticism regarding the lyrics is definitely - I feel like Mark tries way too hard to keep up with Skiba's head on songs. I was going over Black Rain, a song where it's kind of absurd Skiba simply isn't given the entire thing. He keeps it pretty simple and straight forward regarding heartbreak. 

Tragedy 
Erase my memory 
And now all I see is this black rain

tragedy
You took my everything 
now all I feel, all I feel is pain

how can I go on knowing that I lost you
Where did I go wrong? Where did you run off to?
I'm lost down here, broken and alone

and then Mark cuts in, and just...misses the mark completely. 

He's like a hyper dog that mistakes the act of somebody laying down for wanting to wrestle. 

"Lost down here. Lost. okay. Hm lost- finding- how about 

I went in search for some answers but all I found were... MONSTERS!" 

He turns it into this whole...thing. I don't know. A thing that tries way too hard and fails at sounding deep. 

I wonder what the version would've been like, where Skiba just takes it, runs with it and the entire thing is simple, straight forward and honest in the pain it presents. 

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1 minute ago, JarJarBlinks said:

After a couple of listens, my one criticism is that I feel like the intros are lazy.  A decent chunk of them start the same before turning into their respective songs.

darkside and pin the grenade both employ the silent break in instruments preceding the second verse -- more feldy boring pop songwriting tricks

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37 minutes ago, Ari said:

Show me the majority of any albums from bands in this genre, and others and blink in general and I will show you parts that are this lazy and clunky lyrics wise, while also a bunch of raw, real, good lyrics as well. 

well, duh. it's why i always placed blink above their contemporaries -- mark and tom were excellent songwriters. my point is there are more clunky, nondescript lyrics on this album than there are raw, truthful ones, and certainly more than any original blink LP

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24 minutes ago, Elisa said:

I think Mark has started to become a storyteller and not a character in the story. He always used to write about himself but if we want to believe he has a songwriter block, then it's good for him to write about something else. He's pushing 50 and he's living a good life, at some point you run out of ideas and you don't have to feel like your life has to be super interesting to write stuffs. I'm not justifying lazy lyrics, especially from Mark who is known as an avid reader, he meets plenty of people, sees so many different places etc. but at the end of the day he writes for an audience of presumably normal people, so you have to write something people can relate to. People who blatantly write about how interesting their life, probably lie about their exploits, if it makes a good song.

I love Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen and even they are/were mostly storytellers, but I don't expect that level of committment from Mark haha his lyrics have improved from California, they aren't stellar but it's still blink-182. (Those lyrics in On Some Emo Shit are kinda cringy but they still sound good when you listen to them and I can accept them.)

The chorus has awesome lyrics. The verses are cringy.

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yesterday i listened, back to back: neighborhoods, california (including deluxe) and nine.

nine has flattened since i first listened to it. it mushes down into a soup with california to my ears. like, i could put both albums on in shuffle, and it would just be one long effort. and then i realized, it's just this guy mark and this guy travis and this other guy matt from alkaline trio, a band i've seen many times since 2001. and this guy john who used to sing in goldfinger, that band i saw once in 1996.

and then i put on is this thing cursed. and it was better to me than anything on california (including deluxe) or nine.

there is not a single track on california (including deluxe) that i love. and i've realized there's not a single track on nine that i love, either. no hate, no. but no real love either.

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9 minutes ago, daveyjones said:

yesterday i listened, back to back: neighborhoods, california (including deluxe) and nine.

nine has flattened since i first listened to it. it mushes down into a soup with california to my ears. like, i could put both albums on in shuffle, and it would just be one long effort. and then i realized, it's just this guy mark and this guy travis and this other guy matt from alkaline trio, a band i've seen many times since 2001. and this guy john who used to sing in goldfinger, that band i saw once in 1996.

and then i put on is this thing cursed. and it was better to me than anything on california (including deluxe) or nine.

there is not a single track on california (including deluxe) that i love. and i've realized there's not a single track on nine that i love, either. no hate, no. but no real love either.

Yeah Is This Thing Cursed is brilliant, to be fair. I love it, it was so refreshing after California. Literally listened to the title track this morning, still love it. I definitely don't feel the same thing from any of this stuff. 

Legit think a lot had potential to be really good though. 

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1 hour ago, Elisa said:

I think Mark has started to become a storyteller and not a character in the story. He always used to write about himself but if we want to believe he has a songwriter block, then it's good for him to write about something else. He's pushing 50 and he's living a good life, at some point you run out of ideas and you don't have to feel like your life has to be super interesting to write stuffs. I'm not justifying lazy lyrics, especially from Mark who is known as an avid reader, he meets plenty of people, sees so many different places etc. but at the end of the day he writes for an audience of presumably normal people, so you have to write something people can relate to. People who blatantly write about how interesting their life is, probably lie about their exploits, if it makes a good song.

I love Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen and even they are/were mostly storytellers, but I don't expect that level of committment from Mark haha his lyrics have improved from California, they aren't stellar but it's still blink-182. (Those lyrics in On Some Emo Shit are kinda cringy but they still sound good when you listen to them and I can accept them.)

even a great band like the ramones ran out of ideas and kept making records for years

so it would be nothing exceptional if blink started to do the same with a good song in the mix here and there

prob 70 percent of the songs on NINE are songs that good song writer like mark and  matt could write 500 of in one recording session

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5 minutes ago, Nshesaid said:

This thread is so #toxic. I'm gonna go back to enjoying it for another couple weeks before the novelty of newness wears off.

Well, don't step into the thread then. It's intended for those who wanna talk about its faults so we don't bring down other threads. Stay in all the others. 

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3 hours ago, blinkstillrules said:

blink-182 are the king's of the I-V-VI-IV chord progression.

more singles than any other band in the entire pop punk genre. and if you count non-singles (or even non choruses) then... yea.

i'd call blink the ramones of I-V-VI-IV (who, ironically, never had much use for it themselves). every band in every genre eventually writes a song based around it. sure. i get that. but with blink, more often than not, it's been an unimaginative crutch for lazy writing. i mean, if you look at the breadth of say, bad religion's career, they've rarely gone there ("you've got a chance" comes to mind) and didn't go full-song I-V-VI-IV until "my sanity" off their most recent age of reason (and it's the exact same key and tempo as "dammit" which i found charming).

and it get even crazier... two of blink's most well-known covers, "another girl another planet" and "a letter to elise".... surprise! I-V-VI-IV. they can't avoid it even when they're not writing the songs.

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3 minutes ago, daveyjones said:

untitled is a pile of wet garbage, so it doesn't really matter with regards to the details.

Why do you honestly feel this way?  Here's your Letter, Easy Target, Feeling This, Asthenia, Always?

I don't see how someone can viscously hate those songs at the least.

I can understand stuff like Obvious, Down, Miss You, ILWY being polarizing.

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2 minutes ago, Nshesaid said:

Why do you honestly feel this way?

i mean, in this thread i'm just trolling my line.

i've gone over and over and over it on these boards. untitled is my least favorite blink album. has been since it came out.

"feeling this" that song was a joke to me when it came out. the same song they've written time and again, but somehow, worse. "here's your letter" is one of the more tolerable ones. "always" is bad... again, a song they've already given us before, but somehow worse.

i know it is hard for younger fans to understand, but if cheshire cat was like your most favorite record in the world in high school (every song, every note) and dude ranch was pretty good but not as close to your heart, and then enema came out and it was ughhhhhh and things just went down from there...

... and then you're in your mid-twenties and out of college and untitled comes out. i don't know how else to explain it, that album sounds like it came from mars. i'll never like it.

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5 minutes ago, daveyjones said:

i mean, in this thread i'm just trolling my line.

i've gone over and over and over it on these boards. untitled is my least favorite blink album. has been since it came out.

"feeling this" that song was a joke to me when it came out. the same song they've written time and again, but somehow, worse. "here's your letter" is one of the more tolerable ones. "always" is bad... again, a song they've already given us before, but somehow worse.

i know it is hard for younger fans to understand, but if cheshire cat was like your most favorite record in the world in high school (every song, every note) and dude ranch was pretty good but not as close to your heart, and then enema came out and it was ughhhhhh and things just went down from there...

... and then you're in your mid-twenties and out of college and untitled comes out. i don't know how else to explain it, that album sounds like it came from mars. i'll never like it.

I get it because that's how a lot of us feel about California and Deluxe, it came out a couple years post college and mid 20s for me.  But the only thing that stops it from leaving it at just that is that it was SO well done, in terms of authenticity, production quality videos, relevancy, etc.  California is so clearly a step below in all those departments. 

I mean Tom is unrecognizable from CC to Self Titled so if that's your dearest album it would not feel like the same band.

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