Tampa Calling

Some shots from last night’s Green Day show at the forum. More will be featured in a follow-up review of the show that will be posted sometime tomorrow. Stay tuned.

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Green Day
21st Century Breakdown
Reprise

It may be a quaint notion in the download era, but I still think of the Album as a distinct artistic statement. Green Day obviously agrees, because 2004’s American Idiot was a rock opera and their new one, 21st Century Breakdown, out today, is a 70-minute, three-part song cycle.

And therein lies the problem. 21st Century Breakdown, as an artistic statement, is ultimately too much of a good thing. Listening to all 18 songs becomes, at some point, burdensome — an exercise in pop-punk overload.

That the disc is essentially a big slab of agitprop set to catchy hooks and big guitars only compounds the problem. As if the title “Know Your Enemy” wasn’t evidence enough, here’s a sample lyric: “Bringing on the fury/ The choir infantry/ Revolt against the honor to obey.”

Angry, alienated sick-and-tired Green Day rail against religion, conformism, complacency, consumerism, media overload, all the usual tropes. Americans are little more than zombies. Did you know, for instance, that according to Green Day, “You’re the victim of the system/ You are your own worst enemy?”

Maybe I’m cranky, maybe I’ve heard it all, but I’m not of a mind to be preached to and berated by Billie Joe Armstrong and his wingmen. Read the rest of this entry »

Just in from the St. Pete Times Forum:

Green Day will play the St. Pete Times Forum in Tampa on Mon., August 3. Tickets go on sale Friday, May 8 at 10 a.m.

Green Day are touring in support of their long-awaited eighth studio album, 21st Century Breakdown, which will be released globally by Reprise Records on Friday, May 15.

Green Day recently performed 21st Century Breakdown in its entirety during a series of club shows for hometown fans in the San Francisco Bay Area. In its review of a show at Oakland’s Fox Theater, Rolling Stone commented that the band, augmented by guitarists Jason White and Jeff Matika and keyboardist Jason Freese, had the “Quadrophenia-like hang of 21st Century Breakdown’s classic rock melodies and lifetime-punk drive down solid” and that the album is “rock opera in which the rock always comes first.” Read the rest of this entry »