Please Stop With The Pink Floyd & Radiohead Comparisons

While sharpening the shovels for this summer’s big Blink-182 reunion tour, guitarist/co-frontman Tom DeLonge says that he’s still busy working on a new Angels & Airwaves album/film called Love, but he plans to release both projects for free once they’re finished. And naturally, the hype is deep and wide, pulling out the new standard bastard-child Holy Trinity of rock album comparisons.

“It’s like blending Radiohead and U2 together with these kind of Pink Floyd movements,” he explains. “Things happen unpredictably and take you to these epic soundscapes. It’s very much in the spirit of Angels & Airwaves, but it sounds way, way more thought-out and way more ambitious.” Yawn. This is beginning to read like a press release – the kind that fill industry inboxes every day, but rarely deliver any actual listenability.

DeLonge says Love is “the biggest release of my life, the pinnacle of my creativity… It’s super conceptual and highbrow in many ways, very artistic, very Stanley Kubrick.” Kubrick! “But it’s not a rock opera,” he explains. “It’s a very modern version of what could happen when you blend the film industry and the music industry together in a very, very arty, kind of cool way with professionals involved all along the path.”

Those are some big promises for the man Ashton Kutcher designed his entire personality around. The movie in question began life as a documentary about the making of Angels & Airwaves’ last album, but took on new life from there.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the music (I think), but the guy really seems to be aging strangely… he’s got that wounded look in his eyes that says he’s seen one too many horrible acid/shroom trips. Or did he just pull out all his eyelashes? I can’t tell.

Keep an eye out for the Angels & Airwaves Start The Machine DVD documentary, which came out Wednesday and documents the making of We Don’t Need To Whisper.