Not bad as a whole, but it feels a bit tired, and almost empty. In the past, their songs about being young and not wanting to grow up worked well because they were young. Now they’re singing similar songs, but they’re all in their forties. They try to recapture the spirit of some of their older immature songs in new songs like Built this Pool, but it doesn’t work as well when married fortysomethings in 2016 sing “I wanna see some naked dudes, that’s why I built this pool” as it could have with teens and twentysomethings in the 90’s. Songs like Teenage Satillites don’t work because they aren’t teenagers anymore. It all feels like a mid-life crisis.

San Diego is the best track here because it addresses the band’s current problems. The two remaining founding members had a falling out last year I think and one quit. The one who stayed laments and part of him wants to go back to San Diego, the early days of the band, but neither one of them want to apologize for whatever happened, and the replacement sings along seemingly as confirmation that they’ll never be able to go back. It’s a fairly tragic song.

The titular track, California, is where they finally grow up and realize that everything will be fine; that they should stop living in the past because everything is fine here in the present… until the last 30 second song Brohemian Rhapsody, where they revert to homoeroticism for an attempt at gross-out humor and shock value. “There’s something about you I can’t quite put my finger in.”

Basically, this album is diet-blink-182. Not bad, but just not the same.

Wow, I didn’t mean to write a whole thinkpiece there. Whoops.