Green Day
Dookie
The Band: Billie Joe Armstrong- Guitar, vocals
Mike Dirnt- Bass, back up vocals
Tre Cool- Drums
Dookie. This album is vintage Green Day. A stunning example of “the good ole days”. Before the whole political era. Now, I’m going to stop there. I’m going to try and avoid talking about the new Green Day era as much as possible and by talking I mean bashing. I think I did enough of that in my last Green Day review. So, I want to try and be as least biased as possible for this one. Anyways, this album is a prefect example of the old Green Day. Lots of choppy power-chorded riffs, driving bass lines and slightly above par drums. Even the occasional solo here and there. What I particularly enjoyed were the vocals. Not because I’m overly fond of BJA’s voice but because the words themselves didn’t have any real serious plot behind them. The majority of them were just silly. I really enjoyed that aspect of the album.
Any of you out who know me even just a little are probably aware of my strong dislike for modern music today because of the mass amount of bands dying their hair black and claiming to have “matured”. Then they spend all their time working on the vocals instead of concentrating on the instrumentals and the vocals just end up turning out ridiculously cheesy. That’s why I have such an appreciation for albums like this or fro example “Dude Ranch” and “All Killer No Filler”. I used those two albums as other examples because they are both by two bands that “matured” later in their careers. Anyways I love albums like those because they’re for lack of a better word “fun”. Sure, there may be the occasional song about being dumped by your girlfriend or something along that line. But a lot of the songs are also about being immature, masturbation, sitting around and doing nothing. Damn, I miss the nineties right now.
Now I’d like to describe how this album made me feel because well, someone once told me to that in my reviews. So, here goes. As I already said it was a very fun album, so naturally it made me feel kind of happy. This is actually a good album to listen to if you need to get pumped up for something. This is probably due to the albums rather quick pace and somewhat powerful vocals. Honestly, it’s hard to just sit down and listen to this album, its fun-ness and fast pace make you want to get up and go do something. Something stupid to be more specific. Like go run into some head first so that your friends will pay you a small amount of money. Overall, this album is just so silly and fun that it makes you want to be stupid.
I must admit in the past I had under-rated Green Day’s instrumentals, to a degree. The guitar could definitely be described as adequate or above average. Sure pretty much every song was composed of power-chords but it didn’t bother me too much. Also, props to BJA to being able to write 13 or 14 (I say 13 or 14 because I think 1 track is actually made up of actual chords instead of power-chords) tracks composed of power-chords and not have any sound like any other tracks. Now, sure some tracks were reminiscent of others, but none really sounded the same. Also, as I previously mentioned there were some solos scattered about. None of them were too great, but they weren’t that bad either. I’ll use the solo from “When I come Around” as an example. It was relatively short pretty basic and easy to play, but at least it was something. I’d rather have short simple solos than no solos at all.
The albums bass was rather well-written. Much better than I had previously thought. For a good portion of the album it just plays the root notes of what the guitar is playing, but it also does much more than that. It has its shining moments here and there. For example it plays a big role in “Longview”. It’s actually the whole verse in that track. It also has a nice little bridge in “Welcome To Paradise”. Actually in the bridge of that song the guitar ends up mimicking the bass, instead of vice versa. I also enjoyed the tone on Dirnt’s amp. It seemed sort of soft, yet powerful at the same time. I’m not really sure what he did to his amp to get to that sound because well I’m kind of tone dumb. I still use a book to get the right sound out of my Marshall. Oh, I mean my Marshall amp, I just realized how easily that sentence could’ve been turned into a gay joke.
The drums as I already mentioned were fairly good. There were a lot of simple beats throughout, but on a pop-punk album that seems to be somewhat inevitable and it’s not like there weren’t some excellent little fills and role beats on here. There were loads of spectacular fills in “Welcome To Paradise” and “Longview” and in several other assorted tracks as well. The drums were also on time throughout the entire album which was good. That was good to see because over time I’ve noticed that a lot of pop-punk bands have sort of sloppy drummers.
I’m not too fond of BJA’s vocals, but I don’t hate them either. They’re just sort of “okay”. I guess his vocals do go well with the music and it is hard to picture Green Day’s vocals with anybody but him. But there’s still just something I don’t like about them. I find this to be strange because there’s nothing wrong with them. They’re not to low, not high and they’re in key. Perhaps what I don’t like is that there’s nothing special about them. They’re sort of bland in my opinion, but they’re still far from being bad.
Overall Non-Biased Rating: 4/5
Overall Biased Rating As A Metal Head: 2.5/5
Pros: Adequate instrumentals
A good fun listen
The vocals were mostly silly
Cons: Some songs ran together a bit
To be honest, I myself am not really a fan of this album, but most of what I listen to is metal, so that’s probably why. Anyone out there who really enjoy pop-punk or any similar genres you will probably love this album. I’ll say it again, I had under-rated this a tad. Or in other words I was pretty much wrong. Green Day aren’t
quite as bad as I had made them out to be and this album is actually really good to listen to when you’re in a bad mood. I was in kind of a bad mood this morning and it cheered me right up. Until next time keep your stick on the ice.
Metallicaman
