Album Review: Love Album, Part Two by Angels & Airwaves

When Tom DeLonge, always the more emo half of Blink-182, launched Angels and Airwaves in 2005, he sacrificed all the small things for jumbo themes, important-band bombast and Eighties-sounding synths. The group’s fourth studio disc soars ever closer to the sun, with defiant nonsense about bombs falling at dancing kids' feet (lead single "Surrender") and one track inexplicably inspired by the Book of Revelation (the punchy "Behold a Pale Horse"). Want fun? Repeat lines like "The ice is really cold/The streetlights, really old" out loud.

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The second volume of Angels & Airwaves’ Love project picks up where the first left off yet trumps its predecessor quite handily, appropriately offering a cinematic spin on A&A’s trademark blend of Cure and U2. Angels & Airwaves don’t abandon that sky-scraping spaciness -- echoing guitars borrowed from the Edge careen all over the place -- but there’s a force to their textures, some aerodynamic hooks, some shape to their songs that nevertheless don’t sacrifice atmosphere. Perhaps this was designed as a soundtrack to the A&A-produced movie Love but Love: Part 2 winds up as the group’s most effective album yet: it channels their ‘80s hero worship into something propulsive and distinctive.

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