Green Day Nostalgia

When I was a kid, the only music I knew about was what was on the radio, or what I could steal out of my brothers room. Dookie was one of the albums that I found in his room and listened to endlessly, as was Nimrod. By the time I was seriously getting into music and listening to more then just what was available in a closet down the hall, Warning was coming out. So I added it to my Christmas list among several other cds. It was on the list I gave to my sister, who decided the the song titles "Jackass" and "Blood, Sex, and Booze" meant it wasn't appropriate for a 15 year old.

Luckily my brother knew she wasn't going to buy it for me and so he got it instead. I listened to that cd just as much as I had Dookie or Nimrod before. Still, there was something wrong. I was still at a young enough age that I was oblivious to bands I liked not being anything but amazing, but I still knew it wasn't as good.

In the coming years, as my love for music grew, I came to realize that it just wasn't the Green Day cd that I had wanted. It made me jaded to all things Green Day, and I didn't care at all when that singles cd came out, or when American Idiot was announced. Late summer 2004 I went to Warped Tour though, and was handed a demo cd for it. I was impressed. I was just beginning to learn of my absolute love for concept albums, and upon hearing that this would be one I decided to check it out. It was definitely the cd I had wanted Warning to be, a big leap in Green Day's sound.

It was tough to get back into the water after having been out for so long though. I never obsessed over American Idiot like I had past albums. Now, after the release of a new cd that I hadn't even heard about until I was inundated with the single everywhere I turned, I'm still wary. My initial reaction to the first listen is very favorable though.

It seems as though it is another loose concept album, meaning the story isn't as complex as that of bands like Coheed & Cambria or Mars Volta, but it follows the storys of two characters throughout. There are some epic sounding songs on here, none as epic as "Jesus of Suburbia" or "Homecoming" from Idiot but epic sounding none the less. My only problem is that it sort of drags toward the end and some of the songs don't seem to be up to the standards or the ones that open the cd. I don't know if those songs fit into the narrative but I would have just axed them, or thrown them on a bonus disc or something.

With a band like Green Day, who are big enough that a new album once every 4 or 5 years is enough, the albums need to stand up to extreme amounts of listening. I'm not entirely sure if this one does, but there is certainly enough material available for it to if the songs don't get tiresome too quickly. I'm not sure if they've won my heart back completely, but I feel a sense of nostalgia again when I listen to them. They are one of the bands that helped start my love of music but I fell away from later in life. With this release, and Idiot before it, they've taken two big steps back into relevancy though. Hopefully they'll keep growing and reinventing their sound in creative ways and one day I will be head over heels again.