One More Green Day Review, for the road...

We look back a lot on this site to music from earlier times. Lately we've been spending some time looking at one of today's bands, Green Day, which hails from northern California. So let's look at just one more review of 21st Century Breakdown. This review, by Eric Snider, comes from Creative Loafing.com.

Review: Green Day's 21st Century Breakdown

It may be a quaint notion in the download era, but I still think of the Album as a distinct artistic statement. Green Day obviously agrees, because 2004's American Idiot was a rock opera and their new one, 21st Century Breakdown, is a 70-minute, three-part cycle.

And therein lies the problem. 21st Century Breakdown, as an artistic statement, is ultimately too much of a good thing. Listening to all 18 songs becomes, at some point, burdensome - an exercise in pop-punk overload.

That the disc is essentially a big slab of agitprop set to catchy hooks and big guitars only compounds the problem. As if the title "Know Your Enemy" wasn't evidence enough, here's a sample lyric: "Bringing on the fury/ The choir infantry / Revolt against the honor to obey."

Angry, alienated sick-and-tired Green Day rail against religion, conformism, complacency, consumerism, media overload, all the usual tropes. Americans are little more than zombies. Did you know, for instance, that according to Green Day, "You're the victim of the system/ You are your own worst enemy"?

Maybe I'm cranky, maybe I've heard it all, but I'm not of a mind to be preached to and berated by Billie Joe Armstrong and his wing men.

If Green Day had filtered their message through some interesting characters or narratives, I might be more receptive, but, as far as Breakdown is concerned, I'll take my bludgeoning from power chords instead of The Message.

And so I turn my attention to the music. When Green Day's Dookie album blew up in 1994, a new genre was coined: pop-punk. Fifteen years on, no one does it better - not even close. The Northern Cali trio can really work wonders with a limited bag of simple chords, crafting them into ever-catchy progressions. They are also superior hook-smiths; Breakdown contains nary a clunker melody.

And to further add to the album's success, Green Day includes several songs that break from the pop-punk mold, or at least stretch it: the piano-driven "Last Night on Earth," a love song (even angry geezer punks take time out for love); "Restless Heart Syndrome," a wistful mid-tempo piece that dials back the guitar and finds Armstrong sliding into a vulnerable falsetto; a few songs - notably "21 Guns" and the closer "See the Lights" - that emphasize the pop over the punk, and take their own cues from '60's titans like The Who and The Beatles.

The title track, which follows a short intro song, is the grandest of all the statements, the theme- and tempo-setter. It forcefully flows through three sections: straight rock, followed by a jiggish, Celtic-inspired romp, capped by an epic, slowed-down coda. Triumphant.

So you might be thinking now: Does this dude like the album or not? Short answer is yes, I do. But here's the qualifier: Listening to any one, two, even three or four songs from 21st Century Breakdown is an absolute treat. But trying to swallow the whole thing tends to trigger my gag reflex.

Rating: 3.5 out of 4 stars

Listen to Green Day's New Album Now, Buy It Soon...

Green Day's new CD, 21st Century Breakdown, is getting rave reviews from the critics who have heard it. The new album is scheduled to be released for sale online as early as Friday, May 15th and should hit the stores on Tuesday, May 19th. But you can hear it right now, along with two exclusive tracks...

To do so, go to www.starpulse.com, enter Green Day into the search box at the top of the page, and you'll then see a list of News articles. Click on "Listen to Green Day's New Album Before It's Release." The new album includes 18 tracks and, again, on this site you will also hear two bonus songs.

Have fun and come to your own decision on whether this rock opera turns Green Day into the second coming of The Who.

A Retro-Review of Brian Wilson's Smile...

Note: I originally wrote this record review in early 2004, when the long-delayed Smile was released. However, at that time I had no place to post it; now I do.

"God is not subtle." Albert Einstein. But could God have a sense of humor?

A REVIEW OF SMILE

OK, so first of all, forget everything you've read or heard about this being Brian Wilson's Sgt. Pepper's album. This is not Sgt. Pepper's - Pet Sounds was that and more - but another Abbey Road, side two.

Side two of the Beatles' Abbey Road was basically a collection of unfinished songs, ideas for songs that Paul McCartney called "bites." Brian Wilson called his song ideas "bits" and today, in the age of digital recording, they might appropriately be called "bytes," but that's another story. (The idea of playing song pieces derives from the English music hall and American burlesque halls, where musicians who ran out of sheet music to play filled in with their ideas for future songs.)

Smile is a collection of bites and bits and more; and like Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper's the work is more than the sum of its parts. It is a collection of musical ideas intended - like the Who's Tommy or Chicago II - to be experienced by the listener as one piece, from start to finish, for better or worse.

Let me get the worst out of the way right now. The biggest flaw with Smile is Brian's need, then and now, to show us what a comprehensive student of music he is. The pivotal and repeating "Heroes and Villains" theme borrows from Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf." Further, as we listen we hear the influences of Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copeland, Gershwin, Erik Satie, Mozart, Dvorak, movie soundtracks such as How the West Was Won, casino crooners, Spike Jones and his City Slickers, and the colored vinyl children's records that Brian first digested. Some also hear Bach and/or Schubert.

It is all, at first, a bit too much, a kitchen sink approach to music. Just like the 23 tracks on the symphony-like Chicago II was at first too much, especially with the producer's note: "This endeavor should be experienced sequentially." But the more you listened, the more the whole effort made sense and eventually you couldn't consider re-arranging the track order.

This is what happens with Smile. Initially, it seems too cute, too bloated and busy. But then you remember the very appropriate title of this collection, and the original album art that looked very much like the cover of a children's book.

Oh... This isn't meant to be SERIOUS, this is for fun, deliberately childlike and childish in a deliberately non-grown up way.

Come to think of it, too much of our music is far too serious. From Springsteen's post-9/11 The Rising, to Sinatra's aging album September of Our Years ("Tonight is not for fun, tonight is for serious..." said the liner notes), to personal and brilliant but troubling confessionals like Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks and Joni Mitchell's Blue, it is all too serious. It is all so tiredly adult.

So, Smile isn't Paul Simon's Graceland nor Peter Gabriel's Us, but it is equally life-affirming when heard with a different ear; a child's ear, before the end of the innocence. (Interestingly, like those two albums, Smile is acceptingly multicultural and not Anglo-Saxon ethno-centric.)

Smile is not one of those hard to absorb albums about the weariness of life or life's losses or heavy lessons. It's not a divorce album or an album about eventual survival or death. It is a simple collection of songs about enjoying life simply ("eat your vegetables") and having fun. Let's play that funny horn and make silly noises! Let's pretend to fly! I'll be Davy Crockett!

Smile is an album dedicated to the enjoyment of music, the enjoyment of life no matter how short - even if your siblings (like two of Brian's) pre-decease you. Enjoy life even if the worst is going to happen, when you grow up someday.

Smile tells us that music is enough. Smile reminds us that life is a miracle and so this music is Brian's prayer, his tribute, a child's contribution to God. A simple prayer, a fun prayer, a prayer meant to make even God smile.

Smile is not a masterpiece, but for human beings it is close enough.

Thank you, Brian.