Green Day Return With New B-Si... Wait, What? This Is A Lead Single?

When Red Hot Chili Peppers released their most ambitious project in 2006 (the 28-track double album Stadium Arcadium), I thought it was pretty good, but that it's scope outreached its intrigue. Without experimentation and deviation from their comfort zones, it was hard to take on those 28 tracks without boredom sinking in. And it's a shame, because if you cut the weaker half of songs away you've got a hell of an album; instead, the addition of so much padding greatly lessened the album's impact.

Now Green Day, partakers in ambitious projects themselves (what with American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown being modern day rock operas, the latter featuring a wide variety of instrumentation stylistic twists), are taking on their most ambitious project, and the first audio evidence is... underwhelming.

If you're going to attempt to build excitement for a musical event that sees three albums released over the span of four months, you've got to do better than Oh Love:

While not a horrible track, it doesn't exactly make you want to run out and buy three albums. And I think 21st Century Breakdown may be partially to blame for the track's blandness; that album was full of lush, orchestral arrangements that stood shoulder to shoulder with Billie Joe's riffs. Stripping that layer away, it's up to Green Day to carry their recently honed brand of arena rock themselves. At some points during Oh Love, you kind of get the feeling they can't do it. Even an honest-to-God guitar solo can't completely save the track from coming off as more than a little ho-hum.

Come fall, we'll start to see if there's more to this trilogy than meets the ear, or if Green Day are using their grandest statement to say nothing.

¡Uno! kicks it off on September 25, with ¡Dos! and ¡Tre! following on November 13 and January 15, respectively.

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