Popscreen: Angels and Airwaves

Angels and Airwaves

“The Adventure”

Dir. The Malloys



All hail Tom DeLonge! The former guitarist of Blink-182 has seen fit to grace the world with the band Angels and Airwaves, whose songs, according to him, have “the conceptual depth of Pink Floyd, [and] the anthemic architecture of U2…All the songs are very cinematic, anthemic and epic-sounding. The music sounds angelic. Every song gives you the chills and you feel like you want to cry but you’re conquering the world at the same time. It sounds like stadium rock done by a band that’s meant to be the absolute biggest band in the world.” There’s only one problem with this exciting pronouncment: Angels and Airwaves is not a very good band.

Their debut video pulls the same act: it takes itself deadly seriously, but doesn’t deliver. As befits “the absolute biggest band in the world,” the members of Angels and Airwaves do not walk in the video for “The Adventure.” Rather, they stride in purposeful slow motion, whether in a field, in the desert, or in outer space. In fact, they do nearly everything in purposeful slow motion, including but not limited to playing drums, waving their arms about aimlessly, and running their fingers through the tendrils of ferns.

They also have the long hair and soulful gazes into middle distance that denote that they are thoughtful and sensitive, conveying the side of DeLonge that was too soft even for Boxcar Racer. In this incarnation, he, as well as his Angels (and his Airwaves, I suppose), will hold your hand, look deep into your eyes, listen to your troubles, and soothe you with lines like “I will pick you up, like you for I, I thought this thing, I can’t replace.”

Or at least he would, if Angels and Airwaves weren’t too busy boldly going where no angst-ridden alt-rockers have gone before. They are on a mission of the utmost importance: to play their song on a spaceship. A planet looms impressively off to one side.

The whole thing only goes to show that, contrary to popular wisdom, adding “…in SPACE!” is not a cure-all for tired concepts. In this case, “the video that’s just a band performing alternating with shots of them looking all pensive and anguished…in SPACE!” is not a significant improvement on the standard formula for sensitive rockers. Add in a poorly-CGI-ed extraterrestrial landscape, a barrage of stock footage of birds, and WWII bombers, and the result is nothing more than a confusing mess of slow-motion outer-space angst.

—Elisabeth J. Bloomberg