Even with new frontman, Blink-182 still trying to grow up

Vegas seldom gets a white Christmas.

To add a little color, then, Mark Hoppus went blue.

His legs and voice bouncing in unison, the Blink-182 vocalist-bassist sang chirpily of taking a baseball bat to carolers, getting carted off to jail for his efforts and becoming intimately acquainted with a fellow inmate named Bubba.

It’s a wonderful life?

Go sit on a tack, George Bailey.

The song was “I Won’t Be Home For Christmas,” which came halfway through Blink-182’s 20-song headlining set during the first night of X107.5’s Holiday Havoc festivities at The Pearl at the Palms on Thursday (Weezer topped Friday’s bill).

The tune’s an old one, originally recorded nearly 20 years ago, back when Blink was penning songs about the joys of soiling oneself in adult diapers and the pains of getting your manhood caught in police car doors while coming fast and hard with bad puns involving a dude named Ben Dover.

Their adolescence wasn’t merely suspended, but preserved in amber.

In the decades since, Blink has grown up, some of them have become dads, and, on their records at least, they mostly ditched the wiener jokes (mostly).

Speaking of things left behind, they also split with singer-guitarist Tom DeLonge in 2015, recruiting Alkaline Trio frontman Matt Skiba in his place.

Skiba’s not the cut-up that DeLonge is — he’s the kind of dude who paints his fingernails black and pens songs equating heartache to lead poisoning — but strangely enough, with Skiba in the fold, Blink has dipped their toes back into their pull-my-finger past with a pair of tongue-in-cheek toss-offs on their latest record, “California,” their first with Skiba.

Blink played both tunes, “Built This Pool” and “Brohemian Rhapsody,” on Thursday, but though Alkaline Trio has always possessed a dark sense of humor, it was still an odd fit to see Skiba in this context, the incongruities of which become even more pronounced onstage.

Even when Blink abandoned the potty humor on their last two records with DeLonge, live it was another story entirely, with Hoppus and DeLonge continuing with their raunchy between-song banter, which rendered their shows half pop punk hit spree, half blush-inducing stand-up comedy routine.

That element is gone from the band now, though they still play songs such as “Happy Holidays, You Bastard,” a profane seasonal sendup involving a grandparent with bowel control issues. It was easier for Blink to have it both ways when a natural cut-up like DeLonge was in the band, to mature into a group that could play more musically and emotionally sophisticated songs such as “I Miss You” and “Down” next to a never-gonna-grow-up anthem like “What’s Age Again?” and pull it off because of DeLonge’s skill at mixing genuine sentiment with abundant references to various bodily fluids.

Skiba’s an excellent frontman in his own right. He gave strong voice to a show-opening “Feeling This” and powered through a blazing “Dumpweed” with impressive vigor, keeping pace with the heart-attack beat pounded out by drummer Travis Barker, truly one of punk’s finest and a marvel to watch.

But while Skiba’s a good fit musically, he seems out of place attempting to tread Blink’s tightrope between maturation and fart jokes.

“It’s a long way back from seventeen,” Hoppus sang on “Bored to Death,” and for Blink, this journey is not yet complete.

If Blink has served as pop punk’s leering id since the mid-’90s, the band that’s long doubled as its superego, emo-everymen Jimmy Eat World, joined them on Thursday’s Holiday Havoc bill, along with sets by the more metallic Pierce The Veil, and rockers Weathers and The Hunna.

Jimmy Eat World prefaced Blink with earnest pop punk pep talks where soft-scrubbed vocals temper hard-edged guitars.

“Don’t give up your hopes,” singer-guitarist Jim Adkins sang on “Big Casino,” sucking in his cheeks and puffing out his lips unselfconsciously as he gave voice to what is, perhaps, this band’s mission statement.

Like Blink, it’s been awhile since Jimmy Eat World has had a bona fide radio hit along the lines of standards such as “Sweetness” and “The Middle” from 2001’s platinum “Bleed American,” which closed their 10-song set.

And also like Blink, you get the sense watching them live that they view perseverance as its own reward, in pop punk and life alike.

“There’s still some living left when your prime comes and goes,” Adkins sang at one point, living on.

Read more from Jason Bracelin at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com and follow @JasonBracelin on Twitter.