As one of the most successful albums of the 21st century so far, Green Day's 2004 album American Idiot opened up a whole new generation of fans to the music of a trio who had ruled the mid-1990s with their particular brand of punk rock.
Their 2009 follow-up, 21st Century Breakdown, had the tough assignment of living up to the expectations of fans, after the band took five long years in recording and releasing it - but does it deliver?
Heroes And Cons
After a brief opening jaunt entitled Song of the Century, we are launched into Act One of an album following a similar 'punk rock opera' style to its predecessor. The title track, 21st Century Breakdown, is this album's equivalent to American Idiot's nine-minute epic, Jesus of Suburbia. While not as long as the latter, it retains a similar position as a microcosm of the album's intense introspection, and uses a similar mixture of musical styles. What is more, it is a similarly fantastic song.
Heroes and Cons continues with lead single Know Your Enemy, a song that improves drastically once placed into the context of the rest of the album. ¡Viva La Gloria! and Christian's Inferno, two equally impassioned efforts infused with some of the best of the band's trademark punk riffs, introduce the audience to the album's two protagonists, Gloria and Christian - similar to 'Jesus of Suburbia' and 'Whatsername' from American Idiot, the two are a young couple wandering through life and seeking desperately to understand the world around them.
Charlatans And Saints
Act Two of the album begins with East Jesus Nowhere, a catchy yet damning indictment of modern religion in America, while Last of the American Girls and Murder City showcase the developing conflict between the protagonists, as their contrasting views of the society they live in threaten to tear them apart. In ¿Viva la Gloria? (Little Girl) their personal war comes to a head, with Christian left regretful in Restless Heart Syndrome.
This section of the album represents a more thematically specific, and more musically forceful approach from the band. While Heroes And Cons sought to lay out the band's vision of their society, Charlatans And Saints is where the true 21st Century Breakdown occurs.
The two lovers are torn apart by Christian's desire to fight the Powers That Be, as Gloria struggles to reconcile her idealism with the increasing disappointment dealt out to her by those she trusts - much like American Idiot, the strength of this album is in its use of allegory and metaphor in such biting and relevant ways.
Horseshoes And Handgrenades
The final act of the album is where the band begin to really assert themselves. While the second act may be the best of the three in musical terms, Horseshoes And Handgrenades is where they kick the controversy and the tear-it-all-down mentality into overdrive.
The Static Age features classic bouncing guitars as the band rip into modern society's reliance on technology, while 21 Guns is an epic anthem that represents this album's Wake Me Up When September Ends.
The album concludes much the same way it began - American Eulogy is almost a musical negative of 21st Century Breakdown, using differing musical styles to sum up the album's focus in four minutes. Finale See The Light is one of the album's strongest songs, as the band's vision of the past and present modern-day America is brought full circle, with little hope left for the future.
Worth The Wait
Green Day fans have been waiting a long time for this album, and American Idiot left the band with a lot to live up to. However, in this case, it must be said that the band's efforts to showcase their imagination have once again been an unqualified success. 21st Century Breakdown is an album full of the 'big picture' vision that ran throughout American Idiot, and that many punk bands struggle for but never quite achieve.
While their 'pop-punk' style of the mid-1990s has been well and truly left behind, Green Day have found themselves a new niche. They are the voice of a new generation, a generation as upset with the actions of the Bush administration as they are. If they continue making straight-up rock albums - for that is what they make now - with the scope and imagination of 21st Century Breakdown, they will remain a driving force behind that generation as they were the generation before.
