King for a Day

Say what you want, but no one knows how to throw a curveball like Green Day. American Idiot not only reinvented a band everyone thought was done, 21st Century Breakdown proved that it wasn’t just a fluke and provided two of the finest rock albums this century. While the ¡Uno!, ¡Dos! and ¡Tre! trilogy met a more lukewarm reception, the band has made a career out of dropping masterpieces when no one is looking.

While I don’t expect their next album to impact rock the way American Idiot did, I do expect the band to have learned from the mistakes made with the trilogy and produce a highly polished and focused effort. While the trilogy felt like classic Green Day, with fun lyrics and loose, poppy songwriting, there’s a moderate to good chance that this will be another political album, especially given the never ending and escalating number of political scandals, elections and police scrutiny. It’s prime material for Billie Joe Armstrong to mine from.

There is the argument that all of their albums tend to sound similar, but if they changed their sound much people would bitch just as much in the other direction. With the American Idiot Broadway show under his belt, there is plenty for Armstrong to experiment with now on other projects, and he has a knack for writing rock operas. There’s no indication that this is the case so far, but a boy can dream.

Regardless, a national arena tour is much overdo from the band. Green Day put on the single best live performance I have ever seen, and I look forward to seeing them again every time they come even remotely close to wherever I happen to be.

Love them or hate them, new Green Day releases tend to be events in the rock community that forces the mainstream radio to shine a light on punk rock again, no matter how brief.

Long live the kings.

by Kyle Schultz

Kyle Schultz is the Senior Editor at It’s All Dead and has worked as a gaming journalist at Structure Gaming. He lives in Chicago and nine hours to Detroit to see Green Day play a show. How the hell is it that far away? Geography is a horibble science