Blink-182 takes its music seriously

If 1991 was the year punk broke, according to the Dave Markey documentary, 1997 was the year it broke wind.

That was when "Dude Ranch," the second full-length album from San Diego's study in suspended adolescence, Blink-182, was released to platinum sales, kicking the band's career into overdrive, priming the libidos of teen boys everywhere by taking the kind of ribald chatter heard in the average high school locker room and setting it to a rapid-fire beat.

Before too long, the band would be introducing songs about having sex with your grandpa to the top of the charts.

A little over a decade later, Blink is coming off a prolonged hiatus, kicking off their first tour in five years at The Joint at the Hard Rock, where, on Friday night, they hovered above the crowd like a storm front of hormones and adrenaline.

"No one should take themselves so seriously," Blink singer/ bassist Mark Hoppus chirped on the band's hot-and-bothered hit "What's My Age Again?" early on in the group's set, giving voice to the band's fundamental operating principle.

It was important to keep that line in mind as the show progressed and Hoppus and singer/guitarist Tom DeLonge spent a little over an hour-and-a-half engaged in a sort of puerile one-upmanship, diligently trying to out-obnoxious one another with cracks about getting it on with one another's moms, Lance Armstrong, The Rock and Shaquille O'Neal in a raunchy form of smart-ass stream of consciousness.

Their brand of flatulent, scatological humor is dumb, funny and unforced all at once, totally stupid and juvenile, more Farrelly Brothers than Judd Apatow.

But it suits Blink's hard melodic pop well, adding lots of lascivious levity to a repertoire posited mostly on real sentiment.

For all the goofing off that Blink does on stage, where they mug for the crowd, leering and sneering, flipping the bird and faking antagonism, at the heart of this band is an open, unguarded sentimentality that would be blush-worthy if it wasn't so blue.

The band's catalog reads like some mushy Hallmark card covered in curse words.

At The Joint, they traded in teen insecurities ("Do you like my stupid hair? Would you guess that I didn't know what to wear? I'm too scared of what you think," DeLonge sang on a "First Date") and rejection ("She said that I'm not one that she thinks about," Hoppus sighed on "Don't Leave Me.")

When Blink went their separate ways a few years back, it was in the wake of their best album up to that point, the band's self-titled 2003 disc. In the equally brooding and biting record marked by both emotional and musical growth, the trio at least tried to be more poetic than pubescent for the first time.

The band revisited that disc more than any other at The Joint, veering between teeth-gnashing tantrums ("Stockholm Syndrome"), sad-eyed balladry ("I Miss You") and cloudy pop wistfulness ("Always").

Blink often put the hammer down on their tunes, especially when it came to tearing through high velocity, old school heart attacks like "Josie" and "Carousel."

Most of the muscle was provided by Blink's key component, drummer Travis Barker, who was hard to take your eyes off, pistoning up and down in his seat, lashing his kit feverishly with his elbows high in the air. He has incredible hands, some of the best you'll ever see, peppering Blink's tunes with fantastically athletic rolls and fills.

"Travis Barker made all the girls pregnant with that last fill," DeLonge quipped after a tough and terse "Easy Target." "You won't even know it until nine months from now, when the baby comes out and looks like Travis."

And this was pretty much the way it went the whole night. Every shining moment was soon deflated by these dudes' knowing sense of self-awareness.

To wit: In the foyer outside the venue, the band sold T-shirts that read, "Blink-182 crappy punk rock."

On a night when the snarkiness came packaged in super-sized bundles, even the band's merchandise was delivered with a wink.

Contact Jason Bracelin at 383-0476 or e-mail him at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com.