Why Blink-182's new album "Neighborhoods" needs to be good.

Reading 2010. The final night of the festival. Blink-182 are on stage and are undeniably the band everyone has been waiting for the whole festival. Towards the beginning of their set they start playing Miss You. I don't know whether it was because they were a brilliant live band or it was because I was starting to sober up, (2 hours previously I was asleep/passed out on my friend's shoulder during Weezer's set....) but I found myself almost moved to tears. Granted it is one of the more emotional songs in the Blink canon but it is still a damn good song that pretty much everyone can relate to. From that moment on I went from being a casual listener to an enthusiastic fan as I found myself almost speechless after the set had finished. They were truly the perfect close to the festival after the Guns N' Roses/Axl Rose Show disaster that opened it. 4 months or so later when news of another UK tour in the summer of 2011 me and my friends seized the opportunity to go and see them again. There was even better news still to come when a new album was in the works and it was due for a summer release.
However.....
In April this year the music world was granted with this statement from Mark Hoppus: "It is with heavy hearts that we have to announce our planned 2011 European summer tour has been rescheduled. When we booked the tour last year, we were confident that we would have the new album out before the summer. Turns out we were mistaken as the album is taking longer than we thought and won't be out till later this year."

Admittedly I wasn't too bummed out about this. I couldn't get standing tickets and the only seats I could get was towards the top of the O2 Arena so I wasn't expecting the gig to be better than Reading's, being as I was quite near the front. But it was the one gig that the majority of my group of friends from home in Plymouth were going to so it would have been a lot of fun nonetheless. 
What was more annoying was the fact that not long after the band announced that they were due to start a tour in North America beginning in August. This pissed off a lot of people, my friends included, being as they disappointed their fans by making us wait a full year for £40 tickets we bought in November. Only to announce weeks later that they were going to play a big tour of America that was to start in August, not long after they would have played in Europe. They did offer refunds which I had no choice to accept due to having no money at that point but the majority of my friends are still planning to go and I hope they have a good time!  
Thankfully I still had the album to look forward to, which although they were pressured to finish it by Geffen Records by July 31, I still have high hopes that the album will deliver.
On July 14 the first single, "Up All Night" was released. When I first listened to it, it did not sound like a traditional Blink song, (although to be fair their previous album didn't have the traditional sound either) but I still enjoyed it. It took me a couple more listens to fully appreciate and I think its a worthy comeback song that dares to be different to what Blink have released previously. At the end of the day the three band members are approaching 40 so it was bound to have a different sound.
However the song got a fair amount of backlash. On NME.com people were saying: "Bloody Awful" and "Life long Blink fan, they are my childhood. This song is a disgrace." Hardly a unanimous "All the Small Things" type of praise.
But something about the new album that disappointed me recently (and prompted me to right this blog) was the fact that a couple of days ago, Blink 182 released the track listing for the new album. I was disappointed to discover that there was only going to be 10 songs on the album, and 3 songs on the "deluxe" edition. After all the hype of their comeback and their brilliant headline set at Reading, I was expecting a bit more than just 10 songs. Granted its not about the quantity,( Led Zeppelin are prime examples of having a small amount of track numbers and delivering an incredible amount of quality), but Blink are not known for long songs. Although in a recent interview with Jam Showbiz Tom DeLonge says that there are "prog-rock" songs on the album, so it will be interesting to see how the album turns out like.
What I'm trying to get at is this is probably Blink 182's most important album of their career, its their big comeback, if this is a disaster then they are going to be riding on nostalgia for the next decade or so. Lets be honest they're too young to be going on greatest hits nostalgia tours like The Rolling Stones or The Who, this album needs to be good. With their performance at Reading being one of my highlights of 2010, could their new album be one of my highlights of 2011? I'll have to wait until September 27 to find out.....