An insomniac is someone who finds it next to impossible to sleep, a lot of
people find that music helps, but this wouldn’t.
Green Day’s Insomniac won’t help you get to sleep, it’ll make you wake up, wanting to play it again and again. You see, this album has the catchiness of Dookie with the songwriting standards of the better American idiot songs and the raw energy that makes green day so attractive in so many ways. The sheer amount of raw, unbridled energy that this album has comes across in a lot of this album’s songs. The songs on this are numerous but in this review I will give mention to the songs that put this across, as well as putting across the development in their emotional maturity
This is a year after the phenomenon that was and is Dookie and I think, in all honesty, that this is nearly as good. You see the things in this album have a different little twist from walking contradiction being made up almost entirely of lyrics that always almost contradict themselves (much like that little sentence). Billie shows a bit more maturity in some of his lyrics, especially on
86 , which is a song written about his rejection from the Gilman in Berkeley after the band became superstars, the riff isn’t a depressing one but you can tell this song isn’t light at heart when the lyrics kick in. The pop-punk immaturity element is still there though with songs like
Brat which is best summed up as the thoughts of a frustrated kid who just wants to get his inheritance from his mum and dad’s deaths. On second thought, that’s not so immature, the lyrics are sung in such a way to make it not sound depressing but it’s dark, like a lot of this album. It also has a stroke of instrumental genius.
Panic Song is the song on this album that shows that Billie, mike and Tre make up a genius trio, as far as Pop-punk songs from the mid-90’s go, this is the best all round song for lyrics and instruments as the status quo for Pop-punk is boring instruments, this song expels that myth. The lyrics that kick in to the song at the half-way point work really well with the actual music, which has a rather apocalyptic feel, but not in a death metal type way
The only songs on this album that disappoint are
Tight wad Hill and
Westbound Sign. Paling in comparison to the rest of the album, they
just don’t have the same instrumental or lyrical strength that songs like
Brain Stew and
Jaded have. The two aforementioned songs are truly great with
brain stew’s catchy and easy as hell riff and its lyrics describing insomnia linking well with Jaded’s speeded up, mixed about version with it’s lyrics describing (in a round-about sort of way) about the aftereffects of insomnia, or do you think take my hands I think I’m falling off into a state of regression is coincidental?
The closing piece on this album is
Walking Contradiction
, which as I mentioned before, is made up of paradoxical lyrics and a very simple riff.
In short, this album is good. The change in some of Billie’s lyrics
is good, and the simply sublime panic song is just greatness. A real highlight that runs throughout this album is that Green day has discovered their instrumental talents; mike’s bass playing is really good, Tre isn’t using a drum-roll every second and Billie has concentrated on making simple, catchy riffs that will stick in your head. This should be your next purchase if you own American idiot and Dookie.
8/10
or
4/5
or
80%
Until next time…
No worries I'm sure. This Message Edited On 11.25.05
