Review Summary: It’s usually a bad sign when the album title has more ingenuity than the actual music itself.
Back in my innocent junior high days, I took the title of
Take Off Your Pants and Jacket at face value and just went on my merry way. A pretty odd name for an album, I thought, until a friend unearthed the perverted pun for me, and I’ve been ashamed of my initial oversight ever since. Unfortunately, however, the cleverness of the title never really rubbed off (sorry) on the actual music, and Blink-182’s fourth full-length, ultimately, can be seen as the weakest effort of their entire catalogue.
What one is bound to notice right away about
Take Off Your Pants and Jacket is the band’s more-so streamlined sound and an overall lack of an edge. While the previous Blink releases up to this point had a certain tenacity and spunk,
Take Off Your Pants and Jacket showcases the band playing it safe: all the songs are roughly the same structure and length, the production is a little overproduced, and most of the lyrics are spelled-out, simplified retellings of teen romance. Quite frankly, there just seems to be an obvious push to be more appealing to kids, and the creativity suffers as a result. Most songs get by through mildly interesting guitar parts and vocal hooks, but the overall effort seems to be lacking and really just comes across as a typical pop-punk affair. And for Blink-182, well, that’s pretty darn strange.
But despite having an overall monotonous feel,
Take Off Your Pants and Jacket does house some decent tracks. Opener “Anthem, Pt. 2” serves well as a hard-hitting intro, “Story of a Lonely Guy” is a catchy, bitter-sweet tune, and “Everytime I Look For You” has a interesting drive and energetic breakdown. And although I’ve grown entirely sick of listening to them, the album’s singles of “First Date” and “Rock Show” are free-wheeling, fun tunes, while “Stay Together For The Kids” manages to keep a passionate, sweeping energy despite the heavy lyrical theme. There’s really not a bad tune on the album, but again, it’s hard to really and truly sing any song’s praises.
But there’s always been one huge issue that’s irked me with
Take Off Your Pants and Jacket. I can handle the uncharacteristic, excessive swearing (“Reckless Abandon”, “Shut Up”), the addition of a joke track (“Happy Holidays, You Bastard”) and the fact that the band who previously sang about going away to college and not being liked at 23 are now dwelling on typical 12-year-old problems. No, the real issue here is the fact that arguably the three best songs of the recording session (“What Went Wrong”, “Time To Break Up” and “Hold On”) are not included on the album, but are split up across three different versions of the album as bonus tracks. This blatant cash grab is pretty insulting, and it really exemplifies how Blink-182 was really just being used as a marketing tool at the time. The true workings of
Take Off Your Pants and Jacket are pretty transparent, I think, as the album wasn’t so much an honest creative effort as it was a dumbed-down attempt to appeal to a younger audience and increase record sales.
As a fan of the band, I’ve basically disowned
Take Off Your Pants and Jacket completely, as the album has really nothing special to offer. Never before (or since, for that matter) has the band been so stale and mundane, and the hollow marketing ploys and tactics don’t really help the album’s cause. I may have enjoyed this album as a kid, but now that I no longer worry about staying out past my curfew, I look back at this album and see it for what it really is: painfully average and hopelessly dishonest. For shame, Blink, for shame.
