blink-182 - Buddha (Casette version + Promo tracks)

blink-182 gets a lot of hate. they get a lot of love too, but in the punk community they are generally despised. And rightfully so, as a lot of things they did were everything punk's hated. Bubble gum pop songs played on MTV with a teeny-bopper fanbase. Not to mention a lot of their lyrics were childish and about girls and masturbating, but I won't stress that a lot, because there are a lot of punk bands who are respected who wrote about the same things (The Ramones' "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend" and Buzzcocks' "Orgasm Addict" come to mind). Of course, I don't consider blink-182 to be a punk band. Calling them a pop punk band is pushing it. To say they were influenced by such bands, definitely, but it's a stretch calling them otherwise. I didn't really pick up on it until recently (as in the past year or so) but a lot of Tom's guitar work has a pretty heavy Screeching Weasel/Jughead influence in it.

That said, I still enjoy listening to blink-182. They were one of the first bands I really got into that I can still listen to today (Green Day not so much), though I admit that their two most commercially popular albums (1999's Enema of the State and 2001's Take Off Your Pants and Jacket) are probably my least favorite. I've discovered that some people are still surprised to this day that the band has releases dating back to 1992, when Tom's voice was even worse than when they could afford a nice studio producer (Mark's is roughly the same, pretty clean), the sound quality was pretty lo-fi, the band didn't rely on novelty songs like "Happy Holidays, You Bastard" or "The Party Song" and the pop trio still got along (actually, when Mark and Tom got along, these recordings I'm referring to are from before Travis' time)

What I have here today is their Buddha demo, back from when they were known simply as blink. Not the CD version that was re-released by Kung-Fu Records in 1998 after they began to hit it big with Dude Ranch, but the tracks that were found on the original cassette (what are those? amirite?) demo plus the songs that were only released on the promo cassette they made in honor of said demo. There are a lot of songs here for a band that hadn't yet recorded anything else (23 songs total) and quite a few of them were re-recorded for Cheshire Cat, while about two or three were re-recorded for Dude Ranch. I actually prefer some of these versions to their studio counterparts (TV sounds a lot better with the channel surfing clip in the intro and I think Wasting Time works better without that "driving naked" line). There are the songs where the studio version is the greater one (Degenerate, Princess Leia), and then there are the songs that I just love regardless of which version it is (Fentoozler, Point of View, and the ever-great Carousel). I guess you could just form your own opinion though by checking it out.


01. Carousel
02. TV
03. Strings
04. Fentoozler
05. Time
06. Rebecca and Romeo
07. 21 Days
08. Sometimes
09. Degenerate
10. Point of View
11. My Pet Sally
12. Reebok Commercial
13. Toast and Bananas
14. The Family Next Door
15. Transvestite
16. Princess Leia (later titled "A New Hope")
17. The Girl Next Door (Screeching Weasel cover)
18. Strung Out (later titled "Enthused")
19. Ben Wah Balls
20. Does My Breath Smell?
21. Voyeur (not the same song titled "Voyeur" on Dude Ranch)
22. Wasting Time
23. Don't

Tracks 1-15 original Buddha Cassette tracks
Tracks 16-23 Buddha Promo tracks

http://www.mediafire.com/?dmwdayvnwrt