New love

Thomas, being the great source that he is on what's going on in music, told me about Angels and Airwaves months and months ago. I, being the stressed out mother that I am, felt that I didn't have time to explore any new music. I should have listened. I heard the single on the radio, of course, it being one of the few songs that KROQ consents to play even though the band doesn't have the words "Pepper" or "Killers" anywhere in their name, but I wasn't really paying attention except to think, yeah, it's a pretty good song. Then this morning I stumbled across an old Blink 182 song on my iTunes list and remembered about Angels and Airwaves and how they were pretty good, I seemed to remember. So I headed over to their website and checked out the video for The Adventure (which you should check out too, here). And fell in love.

What I can't understand is how Blink 182, a band that used to make me routinely want to rip the radio out of the dashboard of my car and hurl it into oncoming traffic, became something as incredible as Angels and Airwaves. It's like Tom Delonge woke up one day and went, "I think today I'll begin to actually be a musician." And then created this, a group with an epic sound that would fill up a stadium in a way that would recall the glory days of U2. But there's something a little darker about them, too, a little bit of Cure mixed in there that makes me love them that much more. Tom Delonge still sounds like a bit of a snot-nosed punk-whiner, but somehow it works better than it used to.

This morning KROQ announced that Angels and Airwaves will be performing the second night of Acoustic Christmas. And that's enough to make me want to go, even though I swore I'd never go to another KROQ festival, even though I'd rather be stuck in an elevator with Britney Spears for ten hours than endure a Gnarls Barkley set. I'd do it to see them live. I think it'll be that good.