Review Summary: Green Day's real maturity album surmounts its flaws through sheer force of character.
First of all, I have to thank Sputnik for letting me know the new Green Day was out. Oh, sure, I’d been keeping tabs on the group’s Facebook looking for news, as well as scouring the Internet for possible leaks, but it wasn’t until I saw the first review on this site that I knew of the album’s physical existence. So I went out, got it, listened to it a few times, and now I’m ready to present my own take on it.
As many of you know, in recent years it has become fashionable to hate Green Day. All the respect garnered by the seminal
Dookie ten years previously was seemingly lost in the wake of the eyeliner and controversy that surrounded 2004’s
American Idiot. Half the world went crazy and proclaimed Green Day as their new favourite band; the other half condemned them to the eternal fires of Hell. A few enlightened listeners and fans saw past the eyeliner, the politricks and the tween-baiting emo overtones of lead single
Boulevard of Broken Dreams to what was beneath: the group’s best, most consistent album since their 1994 masterpiece.
I was one of those fans, and I have been unabashedly enjoying
Idiot for the last five years. Still, even I felt a twinge of fear for the outcome of the group’s new album: would they go even deeper into punk-Queen rock-opera territory and drown? Or would they put out another slab of mediocre punk a la
Nimrod? Whatever the option, things weren’t looking good. Which is why I am elated to say that, yes, this is Green Day’s best album since
Dookie, even surmounting their previous effort for sheer solidity and quality.
However, this release is not without its flaws, so let’s start with what the group did wrong:
eighteen songs. If your band doesn’t play grindcore or isn’t named The Ramones, 18 tracks is definitely overkill, and there’s many a hip-hop fiasco to back this theory up. Plus, unlike other Sputnik reviewers who stated that “there were no weak songs on the album”, I see at least a couple of lacklustre to decidedly weak tracks near the end of this opus. All in all, I think the group would have been better off chopping a few songs off, leaving the record at the vicinity of 15 tracks.
Still, that’s all the flaws I can really point out in this album. Oh, sure, the lyrics are nothing special, and that “sodomized dog” line sticks out like a sore thumb, but hey, they’re not bad, either. Billie Joe still proves capable of penning a couple of genius one-liners (“
she wears her overcoat for the coming of the nuclear winter”) and although the political edge is passé in the Obama age, he still manages to sound relevant and genuinely emotional about what he is singing.
But the greatest strength here is the songwriting itself. Faced with the dilemma of what direction to follow after
American Idiot – as they had when they followed
Dookie with
Insomniac – the group again opted for a compromise, which means around half the songs here follow the grandiloquent rock mold of
Idiot, while the other half reverts to the group’s pop-punk roots, without ever losing its maturity.
Additionally, it is on this album that Green Day embrace their status as daddies of the punk-pop genre (much as the Ramones did in the 90’s) and try to teach the kiddies how it’s done. When a fuzzy bassline reminiscent of The Hives appears on
Christian’s Inferno, we think it’s a coincidence; when it returns in the beginning of
Peacemaker and then
again on
The Last Of The American Girls we realize that it is absolutely intentional.
The Last of The American Girls shows the group flirting with 80’s goth-rock and new wave, while intro
Song of The Century is rather reminiscent of the first track on My Chemical Romance’s
The Black Parade…except made more tastefully and with much less whining.
In fact, the first half of the album is absolutely flawless. There isn’t a single weak song among the first seven tracks, and they even give us an early standout in
Christian’s Inferno an absolute rollercoaster of a punk-rock track where even the repetitive and uninspired chorus is forgiven in light of its catchiness. In fact, while you’re shouting along to the title at the top of your voice, you barely stop to register the fact that hey, this is just the same thing repeated over and over.
But pretty much all of the songs on this part of the album give us something to love, whether it’s Billie Joe’s vocal line on
Before The Lobotomy, the sudden pop-punk explosion of
Viva La Gloria, the eerie, sweet sadness of
Last Night On Earth, or Mike’s bass coming through the mix on the otherwise unremarkable
East Jesus Nowhere, the first minor stumble of the album.
As the tracklist progresses, however, the songs begin to lose steam, and while there are still fun moments like
The Last Of The American Girls or
Murder City, the amount of pedestrian songs fairly increases, with the turgid
Restless Heart Syndrome leading the way. That,
Viva La Gloria (Little Girl) and
Horseshoes and Handgrenades make up the album’s Trio Of Doom, and begin to drag down our hopes for a final act as good as the opening one.
But then….BAM! Green Day’s two best tracks since Dookie come blasting through the speakers. First, it’s
The Static Age, a should-be-second-single with arguably the best chorus on the record,
Know Your Enemy included. But just when you figure you’ve found the best track on the album, along comes
21 Guns to sweep the rug from under you again. This may in fact be GD’s best track in 10 years, a fully-materialized summation of all those semi-acoustic attempts at emotion from
American Idiot. Unlike on
Restless Heart Syndrome, Bîllie Joe’s “soprano register” works well here, and adds a lot to this sweet electrified ballad.
Before the end, there’s still time for
American Eulogy, a track that harks so far back, it could very well have been included on 1990’s
39/Smooth. In fact, it shares certain similarities with both
409 in Your Coffeemaker, from that album, and unreleased track
The Angel And The Jerk, where Green Day teamed up with Penelope Huston. And it is so good, it almost makes us forgive the overt poppiness of
See The Light, a track that – as someone on this site pointed out – subtly rips off one of the best-known AC/DC songs. I’m not mad, though. For everything that came before, I’ll allow the group that little slip.
All in all, while it may not be a classic for the new century,
21st Century Breakdown is an undeniably solid effort, representing so much more than anyone could expect from Green Day in 2009. It’s still not as good as
Dookie, but it firmly supplants
American Idiot and all that came before it. But for the length and the extraneous filler tracks, would have been a 4.5. As it is…4/5.
Recommended Tracks
Christian’s Inferno
The Last Of The American Girls
The Static Age
21 Guns
