Review - American Idiot - Green Day ***** I may have mentioned Green Day once or twice before on the site, usually as 'crap', 'a pointless waste of space' or indeed 'as punk as my grandma.' Now though, I'm going to gladly eat a few of those words. Green Day have produced a proper punk album, full of venom and righteous anger at the system, and although this doesn't entirely excuse them from having a back catalogue filled with fart jokes and rhyming couplets about masturbation, taken on it's own, it is the finest punk album to be released for a long time. Touted as a concept album, or even as a punk rock opera, the album gets somewhat close to that mark. Green Day as musicians though are not Rush or Muse, don't expect wild variations from them, still, I think they have stretched their limitations here, and Idiot's 13 tracks contain some welcome changes in pace and styling alongside the bouncy pop punk that the band have become famous for. The 'concept' behind AI is also a little harder to deduce, there isn't the obvious lost love motive that powered Marillion's epic Misplaced Childhood, nor the even more direct and accessible storyline on The Streets last, excellent album. The concept here seems to be a little more wooly, sure boy meets girl, falls in love, takes drugs, rages against the unfairness of it all, but I couldn't say that some tracks, lyrically, obviously follow on from the previous one. The album opens with the already familiar title track, choppy and bouncy but politically aware, it's not American Idiot, it's 'please don't make idiots out of the Americans, we're not as bad as our leaders would have you think.' The second (and12th) tracks are both 5 piece epics, with multiple changes of pace and style welded together, Jesus of Suburbia opens up the hollow life of the urban disenfranchised youth, believing more in Oprah and crack than God, finding hate and bitterness easier to cope with than love and honesty. The songs here are the best that Billie Joe Armstrong has ever written, 'Jesus of Suburbia/City of the Damned' with their tv obsessed pointlessness of life become the anthemic 'I Don't Care' chant of youth and then meld back into the mental and drug fuelled confusion of 'Dearly Beloved' and 'Tales of Another Broken Home.' 'Holiday' is my high point of the album, with its driving drum beat and lyrics that you would be happy in the Dead Kennedys were singing, indeed, the specter of Jello Biafra must have visited Billie Joe as he penned... "Can I get another amen ? There's a flag wrapped around a score of men." ...and... "I beg to dream and differ, from the hollow lies." The album continues in mostly fine style, some slower numbers appear, the pain of modern urban life is explored in some depth, the feeling that no matter what the protagonist does,the government will do as it wants. 'St. Jimmy' thunders in and out in radio friendly unit shifter fashion, 'She's A Rebel' and 'extraordinary Girl' keep the pace up before 'Wake Me Up when September Ends' appears. Although the track makes no direct reference to the most important and tragic event in modern American history, it's dating on the sleeve calendar and track number are no coincidence, it's lyrics are filled with sorrow and loss as one of the story's characters considers sleeping away all his troubles. Bang. As the second epic, 'Homecoming' starts, we lose one of the characters, filled with despair, confused and disturbed by life and drugs, he seeks the only solace that he can. Things don't get any better for the others as they struggle through the bleakness of 'East 12th Street' and into the playground chant of 'Nobody Likes You' ("Everyone left you, they're all out together, having fun") and into another anthemic chant of 'We're Coming Home.' The album closes with 'Whatsername', nothing has really changed or improved for our character, the world is much the same, maybe a little worse, and mentally he's in no great shape. The album is superb, ok, so Green Day are not the worlds most stunning musicians, but they have really strived for something different here, it might have taken them about ten albums to get to this point, but they have produced a proper punk record, well done boys, keep it up.