Take Off Your Pants and Jacket
The best moment on Take Off Your Pants and Jacket comes when Blink-182 stop treating growing up as a punchline. Stay Together for the Kids moves from Mark Hoppus's low, restrained verses into Tom DeLonge's strained chorus, making a troubled household feel painfully divided. The two voices give the arrangement a reason to be so large.
Much of the surrounding album is concerned with smaller disasters. First Date turns romantic nerves into a bright, neatly constructed pop song, while The Rock Show makes youthful excitement sound uncomplicated for a few minutes. Both benefit from the band's ability to get to a chorus quickly without making the verse feel disposable.
The playing is more active than those simple outlines suggest. Travis Barker gives the fast songs a lift through sharp fills and changing accents, and DeLonge's opening guitar part on Anthem, Pt. 2 makes a persuasive entrance. The song's accusation against adults is broad, but the music supplies enough determination to make the feeling convincing.
Hoppus and DeLonge also use their different voices well on Every Time I Look for You. The exchanges help the song develop without requiring a complicated structure. Story of a Lonely Guy brings more uncertainty into the middle of the record, giving its familiar relationship concerns a less triumphant tone.
There are limits to how many versions of romantic frustration the album can sustain. Some songs offer a strong melodic shape without finding a particularly revealing angle on their subjects. The brief Happy Holidays, You Bastard is a quick joke, and its place among more vulnerable songs makes the tonal shifts feel abrupt rather than always amusing.
Still, the serious passages are more than decoration around the singles. They give the record enough emotional friction to keep its confident surface interesting. Take Off Your Pants and Jacket is uneven in what it wants to say, but the band's clean songwriting and restless drumming make plenty of it worth hearing.
