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IN REVIEW: Green Day - "Revolution Radio"


"We all die in threes", Billie Joe Armstrong exclaims in the lead off track of his band's 12th album. While he may be referring to celebrities, he might as well be talking about his career. The messy, overstuffed trilogy of albums Green Day released in 2012 was hampered by Armstrong's entry into rehab and a lukewarm-at-best reception of the albums by fans. It was such a substantial fall that it could have ended Green Day then and there; and yet, here we are four years later, with the newly minted hall-of-famers back to the grind again and asking forgiveness from a fan base left cold by ¡Uno!/¡Dos!/¡Tre!, a project that even Armstrong admits was kind of a mistake.

What we get from Revolution Radio isn't really a return to form, though it is a return to basics; boasting 11 rarely interconnected songs (packaged with a twelfth from the soundtrack to Armstrong's acting debut that is tacked onto the end and seemingly not meant to be taken as part of the album proper due to the previous track's reprisal of the opener and Green Day Big Rock Ending™), the album doesn't seem designed to recall the band's original heyday or their theatrically inclined renaissance despite elements of both popping up here and there. If I'm being honest, the closest cousin Revolution Radio has in Green Day's discography is Warning, their 2000 effort that saw them move toward bigger hooks and a more mature songwriting approach after four records of bratty, star-making pop-punk. Both albums are concise, thoughtful and a fair amount less incendiary than most anything else in the band's canon. The irony is, whereas Warning nearly cast Green Day into irrelevance on account of entitled fans of their snotty punk turning their noses up at it (pun intended), Revolution Radio feels like the album Green Day needed to make to save them, likely from the sons and daughters of the old school fans who were left cold by Warning.

I realize I haven't talked about the music so much, but if you're familiar with the band you pretty much know what's going to happen here; there's nothing truly revolutionary on this record (another pun intended), but there's enough quality here to successfully pull them back from the brink.

October 7, 2016 • Reprise
Highlights Bang Bang • Revolution Radio • Too Dumb to Die

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