Reflecting Pool – Green Day – Uno! Dos! Tre!

From their big label smash release, Dookie, in 1994, to 2003, Green Day released an goodly amount of music, most of it excellent.
Dookie in 94, Insomniac in 95, Nimrod in 97, Warning in 2000, plus the b-side album Shenanigans in 2002, not to mention The Network’s Money Money 2020 in 2003.
From 2004 to 2013 they raised the stakes, releasing less music but growing as artists from punk upstarts to stadium rockers ascending to the throne left vacant by The Who.
American Idiot in 2004, Foxboro Hot Tubs in 2008 & 21st Century Breakdown in 2009 were varied and spectacular and each different than the other.
It’s been 3 years since the band put out any music and, in the interim, they went on to even more mainstream success with a Broadway show based on their music. Which is sort of ridiculous.

Now, just taking a look at that output over 15 years I am struck by something. That’s roughly 125 songs written by one guy. Yes, he doesn’t write everyone’s parts, otherwise they would be The Cars. But, he writes the melodies, structures and lyrics. For the most part. That’s a crazy amount of music for one guy. And if you click on those links you’ll find that most of them are, well, great.

How many rock groups were doing that after 15 years of being in the business? The Beatles? Not one guy and by 1978 few were buying the individual members’ music. I’m not comparing the two in any way except to illustrate the longevity and difficulty in putting out that amount of good, sellable music by any one group, let alone one person.
Queen? 4 guys wrote songs and including them on the albums. And by 1989 they were toast in the big markets.
Kiss? The less said the better. But, really, they haven’t written anything for mass appeal in decades.
Nobody sticks around this long.

So, this fall Green Day decided to move forward by moving backward. Tight punk songs, about love and rebellion and, well, killing a DJ near as I can figure, and offering them on 3 groupings in the span of 3 months. It was a disaster of sorts and a success of other sorts.

Uno came out first and if you waited a month you could’ve bought it for the steep discount to $5 on Amazon. In fact, I paid $5 for the next one and $6 for the third. So, for $16, less than the cost of new CD in the 90s and 00s, I got 37 new songs by Green Day.

I don’t really know how to review them so I’ll take a look at eat record. The sad thing is I’ve been listening to the entire album while writing this and I haven’t been compelled to stop and listen, nor have I been compelled to move to the next song. “(I even find “Kill The DJ” catchy. Sure it sounds like Franz Ferdinand, but FF opened for Green Day when I saw them and I think that’s the best way to pay homage. It’s not great, but it’s catchy). And there

Uno is a punk record. It’s fast and it delivers. It all sounds like Green Day, but it should. What else would it sound like? You don’t read Jonathan Franzen hoping he’ll suddenly have changed his style to be more like Dave Eggers. You don’t watch Aaron Sorkin pieces and complain that everyone talks like they are in an Aaron Sorkin piece. That’s crazy. Artists have a certain cadence, certain rhythms and you either like it or you don’t.

Billie Joe Armstrong, for better or worse, is an amazing filter for everything he’s ever heard. And he’s apparently heard a LOT. I don’t know how he would have the time to listen to everything that seems to influence him, from Queen to the Kinks, to The Zombies, to The Who to Franz Ferdinand and on and on, but it’s all there.

Sure, songs like “Oh Love” sound familiar, hell, “Nuclear Family” calls to ming Modern English, for god’s sake. Troublemaker feels like a leftover from the excellent Foxboro Hot Tubs record. You could do worse. Sweet 16 could be a Fieger/Averre track but they never could quite get it as right as Billie Joe.

All musicians and artists take what they love and recraft them into their own voices. So, I’m done defending Bille Joe and Green Day. You either love them or you don’t. They do what they do very well and there it is.

Those who know me know that I love to look for patterns and clues, raison d’etres, if you will. Like Paul’s bare feet on Abbey Road.

The third album isn’t called “Tres”. That would be three in Spanish. It’s called Tre. And Tre Cool is on the cover.

Uno features Billie. Why not? He’s the driving force behind the music. Makes sense. And Dirnt is…well, Dirnt is the second guy. BJ’s wing man. His buddy since they were teens. The boys could call it a day after this release and go out proud.

It’s difficult to review these one album at a time. They aren’t three different records. They are a collection. And that’s how they should be heard.

UNO!

Grade: A
ASide: Nuclear Family, Oh Love, Let Yourself Go, Sweet 16, Rusty James
BSide: Stay the Night, Carpe Diem, Troublemaker, Angel Blue
DownSide: It’s just a good ol, Green Day rekkid.

DOS!

Dos is a bit of a different animal. Opening with the faux 70s acoustic bit, “See You Tonight” it moves into one of their catchier tracks with the laziest lyrics ever. I really wish “Fuck Time” was better written. It had a lot of potential. It’s hooky as hell rockabilly snark and the music is dynamite, but the lyrics leave a lot to be desired. Oh, what the hell, I’ll listen again. (Update: After more research I’ve learned that Fuck Time was originally called, “It’s Fuck Time” and the Foxboro Hot Tubs played it in concert as recently as 2010. No wonder it sounds like a FHT song.) “Lazy Bones” could easily be a song by The Network but I’m pretty sure Billie Joe is beyond the prankish fun of creating a fake band and writing an entire record for them. So, if we’re never getting a FHT album or a Network record, this’ll do. “Stray Heart” is his “Beat Surrender”. Good thing we get that, too.

The whole album isn’t retro tropes, though. Well, they are but punk tropes so that’s the band’s natural idiom. “Ashley” and “Stop When the Red Lights Flash”, “Baby Eyes” & “Makeout Party” fit that bill and fit it just fine.

Where the album falls down and falls hard is the atrocious “Nightlife”. Rap? Really? What decade is this? It barely worked on Springsteen’s “Rocky Ground” but there it was sparse, this is…bad Missy Elliot wanna be rapping. I’m sure they wrestled with it. I wish that someone else had won that wrestling match.

Billie Joe’s self-transformation into Paul Weller is on the tacked on final track, “Amy”, a paean to the late Amy Winehouse. It’s a simple, single guitar, acoustic bit, the way “Time of Your Life” stood out on Nimrod, but this time it sounds less like The Jam and more like The Style Council.

Billie, your influences are showing.

Grade: B
ASide: Fuck Time, Lazy Bones, Stray Heart,
BlindSide:  Ashley, Baby Eyes, Amy
DownSide: Nightlife

TRE!

“Brutal Love” is the real honorary Foxboro Hot Tubs track. It’s dripping with Lieber & Stoller and latter day Elvis. The slutty Vegas by N’Orleans horns give it even more weight and gravitas. I love it.

From there the album decides it’s time to be epic and fill the stadiums. “Missing You” is a classic downstroke rocker. and followed by 8th Avenue Serenade, a song that reminds me a lot of what Armstrong was trying to do on Warning, push forward, stay true to the band’s roots (it hints at Insomniac) but moves along with assuredness, echoing some of the songs on American Idiot. It would have fit on either of those albums.

It’s “Drama Queen” that is this album’s trainwreck. “Everyone’s drama queen is old enough to bleed now”. It’s sort of nauseating. And amateurish.

Fortunately, we get back to early era stylings with the 1-2 punch of “X-Kid” and “Sex, Drugs & Violence”, catchy, angry, hooky and deserving.

Surely the weirdest track on the album is “Dirty Rotten Bastards”. Stealing from The Marines Hymn, as well as other familiar pieces, it’s reworked into the “Jesus of Suburbia” template. A mini-opera. I like it. But it’s weird, man.

I’d’ve been happy if the album found a way to end after “99 Revolutions”, but I guess somewhere, someone wants a Green Day Ballad. I think that’s always been satisfied by the heartbreaking ode to his father “Wake me When September Ends”. “The Forgotten” is just that. Forgettable.

Tre is the album they didn’t need to put out. It’s a collection of leftovers. In fact I think there’s a dynamite 15-17 track record in this three album set. Stick to that.

Tre
Grade: C+
ASide: Brutal Love, Missing You, Sex Drugs & Violence
BlindSide: 8th Ave Serenade, X-Kid, Dirty Rotten Bastards, 99 Revolutions
DownSide: Drama Queen, A Boy Named Train, Amanda, The Forgotten