BANGOR, Maine — Regardless of how long it’s been since you were in high school or college, you can probably remember what it was like to be young. Not a child or a teenager, but 18, 20, or 23 — a adult on paper, but somewhere in between a kid and a grownup in reality.
That’s exactly the age group that Blink-182 makes music for, and for the most part, that’s exactly who showed up to the band’s Saturday night concert at the Darling’s Waterfront Pavilion in Bangor, with opening bands A Day To Remember, All Time Low and DJ Spider.
The overwhelming majority of the audience — at least 10,000 in attendance, likely more — was in its teens, 20s and 30s, with a smattering of folks in their 40s and older; which is the same age that bassist Mark Hoppus, drummer Travis Barker and guitarist Matt Skiba are. Both band and audience seemed in celebratory moods, with massive cheers erupting when the lights went out and Blink took the stage.
After all, even if you’re long past that strange post-teen, pre-adult age, if you like Blink-182 there’s still a goofy, profane 21-year-old inside you somewhere. Blink’s songs like “Dammit,” “What’s My Age Again?” “All The Small Things” and “The Rock Show” from multi-platinum albums such as “Enema of the State” and “Take Off Your Pants and Jacket” blend irresistible pop melodies and propulsive punk rhythms with lyrics that deal with equal parts toilet humor and more serious subjects like love and depression.
The band’s most recent album, “California,” released this past summer, is the first Blink-182 album to not feature founding member Tom DeLonge, instead featuring Matt Skiba on guitar. Skiba also hails from the popular punk band Alkaline Trio. Though DeLonge left the band in 2015 after years of internal drama, at the Bangor concert, the band had lost none of its seemingly boundless energy or potty mouth humor, playing several songs from the new album as well as the early 2000s hits that made them famous.
The concert was one of the loudest of the season so far, with opening acts A Day To Remember and All Time Low blasting through two fast, furious sets before giving way to headliners Blink, who augmented their 90-minute set with lots of pyrotechnics and explosions. The concert also was the second to last Bangor show of the summer, with just one more concert set — country band Rascal Flatts on Sunday night — before closing out the 2016 season.
