I'm only going to do one post about this, unlike some other people I know

I apologize for the significant delay between posts. As most of the people reading this know (as I'm pretty sure almost all of you were there), in the interim I got married, went on a honeymoon, and moved into a new house. Kind of takes time away from randomly spouting off about music on a blog.

Anyway, for my return post, I am going to honor a request from someone who likes this subject (http://www.centraltarget.blogspot.com/) and discuss Green Day's newest album, 21st Century Breakdown. I must say, I am amazed at how much I enjoy this album. It's not a perfect album, but, considering that I was expecting an out-and-out disaster, the fact that I enjoy most of it is remarkable. Most of the reviews I have read discuss it as a slightly lesser American Idiot, but that is a bit of a misnomer. American Idiot was, if not a true punk rock album, at least owed a significant debt to indie and punk sonics, while 21st Century Breakdown ignores those tropes almost completely and goes straight for the Big Rock Album jugular. If American Idiot's target comparison was Zen Arcade, 21st Century Breakdown is Quadrophenia. It's big, it's sprawling, it's a bit messy, it's overlong, but overall it's a solid collection of arena rock songs, immaculately produced and performed. It's no longer fair to even call Green Day a punk band anymore, or at least to use any punk descriptions for this album, anymore than it is fair to call U2's latest a post-punk album. This is arena rock, shooting for that same level as 70’s-era Who, with the Big songs and the Big production to match. As such, it sometimes goes a bit over-the-top, but that’s what comes with the territory when a band aims for the rafters of bombast like Green Day has here.

It is noteworthy how bits and pieces of the band’s side projects have found their way into 21st Century Breakdown. The opening of “Christian’s Inferno” sounds like a dead ringer for some of The Network stuff, while there are elements of their Foxboro Hot Tubs garage scattered around (they also straight-up nick The Hives’ “Main Offender” riff for “Horseshoes and Handgrenades”, which isn’t a huge deal, except that I really hope The Hives get wind of it, just because I want to read the press release they would put out). Lyrically the record is a bit clunky, but pretty strong overall. While I cannot claim to fully grasp the story, it doesn’t hamper the power of the songs one bit. It is a bit strange how many reviews cite the impenetrability of the story as a major criticism, begging the question of what they are comparing this album to – the powerful narrative of Tommy and Quadrophenia? The clear story-telling of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway? The well-developed characters of Zen Arcade? Concept albums are just generally not exactly well-known for their coherent stories, and holding Green Day to that standard seems disingenuous and a bit of nit-picking.

In short, while I don’t see myself reaching for this album as much as I do Dookie, Warning, or Kerplunk, that has more to do with personal preference than anything else -

What is perhaps most startling is noticing just how far this band has come since its days on Lookout! Records. While the transition from Kerplunk and their early EPs to Dookie is fairly unremarkable (it’s basically just a cleaned-up version of the same style), their finalized transition from a pop punk to pure power pop band with Warning was a much more substantial and noteworthy transformation, and they really have not made the same album ever since. The idea that a band could, in a five year span, produce a dark synth-pop record (The Network), a pure 60’s garage throw-back record (Foxboro Hot Tubs), a long-form punk rock opera (American Idiot), and a full-fledged arena rock behemoth (21st Century Breakdown) is kind of astounding. That they could do that with a consistent core trio is even more surprising, especially as this is the same trio that seemed pretty much relegated to being a band that would come out with another set of solid pop-punk tunes every few years to a steadily dwindling core base. Now Green Day, yes that Green Day, the Dookie guys, are, in 2009, the hoped-for saviors of the CD medium and the floundering recorded music industry. Just think about that for a little while.