+44: When Your Heart Stops Beating : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Shortly after blink-182 announced their "indefinite hiatus" in early 2005, bassist Mark Hoppus and drummer Travis Barker described their new band, (+44), as a more experimental, electronica-oriented outfit. Like Berlin or Postal Service, they said. That might have been cool, but Hoppus and Barker explore the idea with commitment on only a handful of tracks here. On gut-punch punk-pop numbers such as "Baby Come On" and the title track, the keyboards and mechanized beats feel more like an afterthought than an operating principle. "Make You Smile," "Weatherman" and "Little Death" build on the beat-driven sound of one of their old band's best tunes, the heartsick ballad "I Miss You." But the rest of the songs sound like Blink castoffs -- like guitarist Tom DeLonge's first Angels and Airwaves record, Heart supports the notion that Hoppus, Barker and DeLonge's former outfit was greater than the sum of its parts.