Green Day - 21st Century Breakdown

Review for Nexus Magazine (www.nexusmag.co.nz)

Five years after their blockbuster album American Idiot, Green Day return with an even more ambitious album 21st Century Breakdown. I was always interested to see how I found this release, as five years can really change your taste in music (I rather enjoyed American Idiot when it came out). In order to review this album fairly, I had a quick listen to American Idiot first to make sure it stood the test of time for me, which it has. Unfortunately for 21st Century Breakdown, it does not have the songs or soul to support an album this grand and elaborate.

My biggest complaint is that the album is far too long. The album is divided into three ‘acts’, named “Heroes and Cons”, “Charlatans and Saints” and “Horseshoes and Hand Grenades” and while I generally don’t have any problems with pretentious album structures, it just seems completely unnecessary on this album. If there was a narrative structure like American Idiot, where you can hear a story from start to finish, this might have been more appropriate. I had to research on the internet afterwards to actually find out what the album concept was, only to discover that it is a thematic concept album. So if its just a thematically linked album, why all the different ‘acts’? They do not serve any purpose, they just give the album (as a whole) a bizarre feel and structure. It’s kind of like someone taking their first drive in a manual car, it randomly lurches forward, it randomly slams on the breaks hard, and overall it’s certainly not a very pleasant trip.

After listening to the album for the full 69 minutes, I struggled to remember any more than 3-4 of the 18 tracks. To give them a bit of credit, the memorable songs were very good and if there wasn’t so much filler, it would have raised the overall quality of the album massively. For a passive fan of the band, I’d recommend the following songs for iTunes download to save money from buying the whole thing: Christian’s Inferno, Peacemaker, ¿Viva la Gloria? (Little Girl) and American Eulogy. It is interesting to note that these songs draw a strong resemblance to some of the more quirky tracks on The Black Parade by My Chemical Romance, clearly a point of reference for this album.

It is clear that Green Day intended this to be their masterpiece, discarding their American Idiot producer Rob Cavallo for someone with a bit more cred on their CV: Butch Vig (produced Nirvana – Nevermind and Smashing Pumpkins – Siamese Dream to name a few). The change in personnel behind the mixing desk has not changed a single element of their sound. The single Know Your Enemy sounds like it could have been recorded at the same time as their 1990’s hit album Dookie.

The weakest point on the album is the second single soon to hit the airwaves: 21 Guns, a song an MTV news reporter described as a “cell-phones-in-the-air anthem”. No doubt this total lacklustre song will get drilled into our brains on C4 for the next few months! For some reason, bad R&B and hip-hop does not bother me as much as bad rock, and I’d listen to bad hip-hip any day over this song.

Credit needs to be given to the couple of genuinely good songs on this album. If they had channelled the more creative and quirky sound featured in those songs, instead of falling back on their standard 3 chord anthems, this album could have been much greater than the finished product. American Idiot showed the world that Green Day were no one trick pony. 21st Century Breakdown shows that it might have just been a fluke.

Rating: 2/5