The One-Minute Man Award for Album Over Before It Starts

Tie:

Blink-182
Neighborhoods
(Sony; 2011)

Deer Tick
Providence
(Partisan; 2011)

The first words out of Tom DeLonge’s mouth? This requires italics:

I’ll never let you down, boy,
Never let you go.
Her subtle hint of life
Is so innocent and scary.

The words, overpronounced, accompanied by a vocal melody so cupped-into it’s collecting water (teardrops), show in every syllable the sign of a band about as mature as they’re ever going to get. Following eight years of relative silence, two major personal tragedies, and countless unbearable side-projects, this is the new Blink: keyboards, four-minute prog-pop, reams upon reams of Travis Barker solos, and the ever-present, intuitive white noise of Mark Hoppus’s hair growing. You hear that? It’s like the subcutaneous whinny of an adolescent’s pubes first emerging.

The first two minutes of “Ghost on the Dancefloor,” the first track off Neighborhoods, are enough to quit the album and the band cold turkey—and I can’t exactly guarantee I made it further than that myself. Not sure what I was hoping for with that cover; not sure what I was expecting after Barker aided the Cool Kids in the continued abuse of their ecstatic economy; and did I actually kind of think Hoppus was a secret agent underground maven, though I’d never seen his show on Fuse before? Who am I?

“Ghost on the Dancefloor” is a gormless whuss-‘fest devoid of melody, manhole-flat, and when its weighty lid is lifted, there is only a hole underneath—where a pop song, or an indelible drum fill, or a tolerable singer, or your soul should be. It’s like listening to someone cry about getting dumped after being in a two-month non-exclusive relationship and then suggest we all go home and watch Swingers—or some other “getting over her” movie—instead of going to the strip club or drinking six more beers. It’s a load blown like sawdust into the wind, and there is a fucking hour’s worth of music after it.

Yet Blink-182’s mawkish eyeliner-emo is almost quaint when compared to the turd-slick decline of Deer Tick’s John McCauley. As an unabashed champion of War Elephant, I’ve found every record since one more reason to give up on the guy and his whole ig’nant hipster-billy bullshit. Yet Divine Providence, also bearing a migraine of an album cover, is a new, incontrovertible low, the absolute worst of a reasonably talented band pushed front-and-center as if such vices and antisocial quirks were the keys to band’s sound all along.

Opening track “The Bump” is harmless enough, though already the tone is set when McCauley (probably) compares himself to a snort of coke, but next track “Funny Word”—with its pre-song “You fucking douchebag” said to no one in particular, but probably to you, Listener, because a band that hates its fans makes an album like Divine Providence—serves as the clarion call for all to come: extended soundbytes of belching; some crappily recorded “blues” songs about being a bunch of ass-clowns; generally fucking obnoxious crap.

There is no reason to go forward, unless you revel in such shamelessness. Because it’s a celebration of the kind of people who clog dive bars and buy the least expensive drinks and tip the bartender nothing and smell like shit and spit in front of you on the sidewalk after loudly clearing their sinuses (which sounds somewhere between Loutallica and the oinking parts from that Matthew Herbert album) and smoke in front of the open door when they go outside for a cigarette and Occupy Everything but Embrace Nothing. The kind of people who give a bad name to young, urbane, creative populations in big cities who have respect for their bodies and for others. Divine Providence claims Vice magazine should be given a Pulitzer; Divine Providence is why the world hates America.

You fucking douchebag, John McCauley.