Rating: 4 stars (out of five)
Green Day offer up 21st Century Breakdown having done their fair share of conquering in both this and the previous century. They dominated the alternative landscape of the post-Nirvana 90s (breakout album Dookie dropped just weeks before Kurt Cobain’s suicide) and then shocked the world with 2004’s concept album American Idiot, wherein Billie Joe Armstrong silenced those critics who assumed he couldn’t write about anything besides masturbation and boredom by tapping into Bush-era dissatisfaction.
Breakdown, arriving five years later, continues the concept album theme, even though there’s a new president and a little more optimism within the country. But enough of that—what’s really worth paying attention to is the band. The majority of these songs, especially the rockers, sound epic and alive, bursting with blood and vigor; Billie Joe sings with conviction, and the band sounds fuller than ever. Though most of the slow songs sag (the flaccid “Last Night on Earth,” whiny “Restless Heart Syndrome,” and well-sung but cliché-ridden “21 Guns”), overall there’s a strong success rate among these 18 tracks. Standout “The Static Age” has a perfect ear for tension/release. “Before the Lobotomy” is filled with juicy melodies (and seems to give a shout-out to “Basket Case” with the line “I’m not stoned, I’m just fucked up.”) Lead single “Know Your Enemy” is propelled by a heavy yet ferociously catchy, foot-stomping chorus and a titanic drum lead-in from the bridge. The band hits remarkable peaks in the soaring bridges of “Little Girl,” “Static,” and “Guns” that elevate each track.
As is usual for Green Day albums, 21st Century Breakdown is long–too long–though the difference here is that the length allows for more diversity, making room for extended piano intros on songs like “Viva La Gloria,” a Middle Eastern-vibe on the groovy “Peacemaker,” and Queen-style drama on the title track, “Lobotomy,” and others. “Last Night on Earth,” as Rolling Stone noted, sounds like Air Supply (not that this works), and of course several tunes invoke past, Dookie-esque grandeur. Thankfully, the sonic doodling doesn’t sound forced; it just feels like the band, with little left to prove to the pop-punk audience, wants to experiment with new material to see what sticks.
What’s perhaps most notable about the musical variation is the way the individual songs themselves often contain distinct sections. Sometimes this works—“Christian’s Inferno” opens with a thick, industrial-sounding drum intro before giving way to a purely Green Day chorus—but most of the best songs here (“Static,” “Little Girl,” “Murder City”) tell us that Green Day is better off keeping the sonic changes within songs to a minimum. The title track starts off magnificently—you’d be hard-pressed to deny the power of Billie Joe’s line “My generation’s a zero / I never made it as a working class hero”—but after the second chorus devolves into an amelodic mess. And, conversely, both “Gloria” and “Lobotomy” could stand to have their first segments cut; the latter is especially invigorating once it gets going, but that takes far too long.
Even though old target George Bush can no longer be used as a piñata, Armstrong hasn’t exactly embraced Obama-style optimism. The conceptual theme this time traces two lovers, Christian and Gloria, as they make their way through this age with confusion, anger, fear, and some resolve. Billie Joe skewers a few obvious targets (religious hypocrisy) and some less-obvious ones (prescription drug reliance) in his quest to find something truly meaningful. There’s certainly no mistaking his feelings when he yelps, “Violence is the enemy / So give me, give me revolution!” There are few great insights in the lyrics, but it’s nice to see that he’s continued to branch out a little, and despite an over-reliance on simplicity, he occasionally finds a nugget: “Do you know what’s worth fighting for / When it’s not worth dying for?”; “The traces of blood always follow you home / Like the mascara tears of your getaway.”
One wonders, however, whether his now ever-present world-weariness drags down his otherwise great sing-along choruses on tracks like “Century” and “Static.” He’s flirting with Bono syndrome—sometimes, you just want him to forget about the world’s problems and sing about something enjoyable, relieving the ambivalent feelings that are engendered by energetic but polemic songs.
That feeling of slight hesitation getting in the way of a full-fledged adoration of the record has company. Simmering gently below the visceral excitement that a listen provides is the desire to make tiny tweaks all over the place. Man, if they just killed “Song of the Century” and “Last Night on Earth,” you think, how much better would this flow? Why couldn’t “Breakdown” have kept going the way it started, “Lobotomy” have opened right at the 1:20 mark? Why couldn’t Billie Joe have gone a little easy on the clichés in “Guns” and really made it a doozy?
If all that happened, then you’d have a stupendous album. But that’s sort of always been Green Day’s M.O. Their albums are typically overly long and sprawling, cathartic, flawed, and usually highly enjoyable. 21st Century Breakdown offers up more of the same.
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