When the next Green Day album was three albums

In 2012 the Green Day with some surprise they announced that their next album would be three albums. And then here comes, September 25th, “A!”followed by “Dos!” (read the review here) in November and finally, in December, from “Three!” (read the review here). Below is our review of chapter one of the trilogy.

The story of Green Day is a sequence of “Who would have thought?” Who would have thought that a trio of seemingly somewhat unlucky Californian punks would have churned out one of the most successful albums of the 90s – “Dookie” single-handedly revitalizing a genre? And who would have thought that in the following decade, after a period of slack, they would have churned out an ambitious work like “American Idiot”, which would have had an equally important success? And who would have thought that, after another rock opera like “21st century breakdown”, they would have given up everything to go back to making straight rock?

And yet this is “¡Uno!”, the first album of the trilogy that will end in January.

Yes, because when they announced three albums in four months, many people thought: “Olé, we missed them. They got carried away”. Instead. Instead, the fact remains that the trilogy is an ambitious and risky operation, these days, attempted in the past only by equally ambitious bands (Van Halen in their golden age, or Kiss, who even released 4 at the same time). But everything is compensated by the result, at least from what we can hear so far. “¡Uno!” it’s a great album of songs-songs. Forget the “concept album” (a term that makes every listener shiver as soon as it comes out of the mouth of any musician), forget the rock operas that become musicals. Here there are 12 songs almost all around 3 minutes, not even 40 minutes, of rock ‘n’ roll. The previews you’ve heard around are representative. “Oh love” is the first single: largely melodic, a tribute to that power-pop that Green Day had frequented in the “side-project” Foxboro Hot Tubs.

More power than pop, to tell the truth. The melody is always there, like in “Kill the DJ”, which reminds me a bit of the Clash, as well as “Carpe diem”. Ah, the good old punk is always there: fast chords and drums are there, pressing even in “Let yourself go” and “Loss of control”. The result is a great album, fun and unexpected, which shows off a pure and remarkable creative streak. Too bad that this creative streak is accompanied by something that is the opposite of “who would have ever said it”, or rather it is the stereotype: Billie Joe entering rehab for substance abuse. But this news does not spoil the result: “¡Uno!” is an album to put on repeat as if nothing had happened, waiting for the (musical) surprises that Green Day will reserve for us in the coming months.