Angels & Airwaves (I know – but bear with me)

My brother and I are curious creatures. There are certainly artists and genres we favour, but if music is good or something is great about it, we’ll generally listen to it and be enthusiastic about it.

A while ago, he introduced me to Angels & Airwaves with something along the lines of ‘Tom Delonge finally got sick of being a smartass and wrote about being in love and stuff’ which is a pretty good rough indicator of how A&A fares versus Blink. Neither of us were huge Blink fans but they’ve always had a few good tracks going, probably a little young in demographic for us – that said, you’d be forgiven for thinking the same about A&A which is almost impossibly younger.

I’m not completely familiar with the other acts that the band members of A&A play for or each individual’s musical proficiencies, but they all seem to be pretty decent players. The A&A sound and writing isn’t exactly ground breaking but feels derivative in the best possible ways, as if they’re celebrations of the other bands whose sounds they incorporate rather than attempting to hijack their sounds.
One of the elements of their material that makes it work exceptionally well though is that it’s mixed by audio god and golden ears engineer, Tom Lord-Alge. The mixing and balance of all three albums is exemplary and it’s a pleasure to listen to.

Coming back to thematic flavour though, lyrically Tom’s themes couldn’t be further from his songs written with Blink. In Angels & Airwaves, he sings about being in love, struggling socially and affirming identity, and embracing mass movements of positivity and collaboration. It borders on the saccharine at times but I find it easy to digest for a number of reasons. Firstly I don’t really have any music in my collection with lyrics that are largely positive and affirming so I guess an overdose from one act doesn’t bother me too much. There are certainly days when I don’t want ridiculous amounts of the sun is shining and we can do anything but once in a while it’s good. I don’t necessarily get anything from the lyrics but at worst they’re nice.

The thing about A&A’s sound though is that of late I’ve noticed it reminds me of one of the other pop-rock sounds in which positivity has a firm place: anime soundtracks. Some of A&A’s songs sound like they’d be right at home in Nana or some of the other slightly more mature dramas and that’s a good thing, it was a nice feeling developing that correlation. As brutally analytical as I can be at times, there is definitely a place for the exuberance of near blind faith in positivity, perhaps associated with and themed in energetic youth. It inspires a certain genuine buoyancy that actually is uplifting in a really pleasant way. Considering the depths to which much of my music collection plunges, I still like having vibrant and happy material in there.

After all, if I ever need to come back down to earth, there’s always Hildur Guðnadóttir’s Without Sinking.