Blink 182: Take Off Your Pants and Jacket

Blink 182:  Take Off Your Pants and Jacket

2001

MCA Records

Format I Own it on: Compact Disc

Track Listing: 1. Anthem Part Two  2. Online Songs  3. First Date  4. Happy Holidays, You Bastard  5. Story of a Lonely Guy  6. The Rock Show  7. Stay Together For the Kids  8. Roller Coaster  9. Reckless Abandon  10. Everytime I Look for You  11. Give Me One Good Reason  12. Shut Up  13. Please Take Me Home


This album is very similar to "Enema of the State"...Same producer, same slick pop-punk sound, same teenage subject matter,  but I like this one a little better...It has a bit of a harder feel...

I can remember cruising around, listening to this in the summer of 2001...It was the last summer I lived in Michigan and the term "Summer Record" still meant something to me...I now live in Arizona and it's always summer here...There's really only two seasons:  "Hot" and "Ball-Meltingly Hot." Right now we're in the Ball-Meltingly Hot season...

 Pictured above, is a good photo of an Arizona summer...

 Pictured above, is a good photo of an Arizona winter...

 But yea...It used to  be that my listening habits were partially influenced by the climate...For example, I'd spend the cold, grey, harsh Michigan winters driving through ice and blizzards blasting  Radiohead's "Kid A," but once the sun started to shine again and I could spend the days at the beach, that meant is was time to bust out "Rock Show."  I kind of wonder what my listening habits would be now if I still had seasons...I hadn't thought of that in a long time...I wonder what my winter record would be now...Hmmm...

All I know is that Blink gave me a lot of good tunes that summer..."Everytime I Look For You" , "Give Me One Good reason", "Reckless Abandon"...All great, hooky pop-punk... They also put in quite a bit of more serous material on the album this time around..."Stay Together For the Kids" takes on divorce, and "Anthem Part Two" actually sounds pissed -off about the state of the world...

One notable aspect of this album, is that on its original release, the CD had different bonus tracks...There was a color-coded sticker on the front cover, which was the only way of knowing which version you were getting before you opened the packaging...

 I apparently have the "Yellow Pants" version, which has ""What Went Wrong" and "Fuck a Dog" as the extra songs..."What Went wrong is a melancholy acoustic emo ballad that's pretty cool, and "Fuck a Dog" is a similarly acoustic track about...well..fucking a dog, I guess...The kind of thing that Blink normally tosses on as laugh at the end of their albums...I had never heard the other bonus tracks on the other versions, so I'm checking them out on youtube, to see which version is the winner...

 The "Red Take-off" version has "Time to Break Up" which is so cool I wish they would have just put it in the regular running order... I would have gladly traded "Take Me Home" for this...The other song on this version is "Mother's Day." I can only describe it as a foul-mouthed, acoustic metal song...Funnier than "Fuck a Dog" in my opinion...

The Green Jacket version has the pretty standard pop-punk "Don't Tell Me It's Over" as the straightforward bonus track and "When You Fucked Grandpa" as the ha-ha song.."When You Fucked Grandpa" is pretty gross, but the section Tom sings is so lilting and heartfelt sounding that I have to admit, I did laugh...

Alright...So Which version is the best? Oooo...This is a difficult choice...Ideally, if there was a version that had all the "straight" songs that would be the one I'd go for, but that doesn't exist, so...

I'm going with the "Red Take Off" version...I think "Time to Break Up" gives it the edge, and "Mother's Day" is somehow the least obnoxious of the joke songs...

So let's check out "Everytime I Look for You" by blink 182...