D Is For Dookie
Green Day
21st Century Breakdown
(Reprise)
***1/2
Green Day are no longer content merely to sing about masturbation. With 21st Century Breakdown, they’ve followed up their breakthrough rock opera American Idiot with another concept album that’s their most musically and lyrically mature album to date. (Granted, this is a band whose biggest-selling album was titled Dookie, but still.) Where American Idiot wallowed in the despair created by everyone’s favourite lame president, 21st Century comes at the dawn of a (somewhat) sunnier new era. However, Green Day refuses to be completely swept up in Obamamania: on “American Eulogy,” Billie Joe Armstrong chides, “True sounds of maniacal laughter/And the deaf-mute is misleading the choir/The punchline is a natural disaster/And it’s sung by the unemployed/Fight fire with a riot.” You can’t help but think that if that choir really does consist of America’s unemployed, they must be pretty loud, and delivering an equally deafening punchline. An album worthy of the hype.
CURTIS WRIGHT
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