Live review: Blink-182 still taps into frenzied fun
The reunited trio amps up the racy humor in the first of two concerts at Irvine's Verizon Wireless Amphitheater.
Near the end of Blink-182's show Thursday night at Irvine's Verizon Wireless Amphitheater, bassist Mark Hoppus revealed what anyone who'd witnessed the previous hour already knew -- during the four-year hiatus that this SoCal trio recently ended, his bandmate Tom DeLonge hadn't grow up one bit."Donny, you're like a child," Hoppus told the guitarist, paraphrasing a line from "The Big Lebowski."
After calling it quits in 2005, Hoppus, DeLonge and drummer Travis Barker began playing together again late last year following a plane crash that Barker survived but that killed four others, including the drummer's assistant and bodyguard. Blink performed its first concert since 2004 in May at a T-Mobile party on the Paramount Studios lot, and this summer the band's been on the road playing the hits that made it one of the most successful pop-punk acts of all time.
Thursday's show was the first of two at the Irvine venue, which seats approximately 17,000 people.
In its original incarnation, Blink wrote about the traumas and triumphs of teenhood with an uncommon grasp of the duality that defines that age; songs such as "Dammit" and "All the Small Things" delivered a potent mixture of humor and melancholy, hope and resignation.