Published on Oct 26, 2000
It’s a shame when young punks grow up.
Just six years ago, it seems like the music world was turned on
its ear thanks to three snot-nosed kids from California who played
under the name of Green Day. With tracks like “Basket Case” and
“Welcome To Paradise,” Billie Joe Armstrong and company made it
fashionable to play punk rock again, and even more fashionable to
like it. Their mud-flinging set at Woodstock ’94 (the one without
the rioting and fires) secured their place in history.
But something’s been happening to the band over the years. It
started with their hit “Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life)” off
their
Nimrod album — Armstrong and crew began to start looking
inwards instead of expressing their angst outwards. Armstrong began
to trade his beat-to-hell Stratocaster for an acoustic guitar. And,
the three young punks — gasp! — grew up.
So maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that
Warning, Green Day’s sixth album (and fourth on the majors),
is hardly the slam-fest that earlier works like
Dookie were. Yet I can’t help missing the pure flow of
adrenalin that their music once was. Armstrong and crew certainly
make some wonderful music here, but stylistically, it fits them
like an off-the-rack suit.
Oh, there’s still some pent-up rage in those guys, even though
they’re all now within sniffing range of the big three-oh.
“Minority” captures this, almost to the point of sounding like a
souped-up protest song. It’s kind of an interesting picture, and is
one track I find myself going back to often.
And there’s still quite a bit of social commentary left in these
guys; the title track is a skewed look at life in general, as well
as all the little warnings we see each day that could wind up
becoming one big roadblock to us. This is an acoustic-based song,
and admittedly it took some time for me to get into this one. But
the chorus is simply infectious, and it won’t be long before you
find yourself hanging around the water cooler singing this one.
That all said,
Warning is an uneven balance between unplugged
experimentation and throw-the-switch energy. On one hand, you have
pure musical magic on songs like “Castaway,” “Church On Sunday” and
“Jackass” – even the soft, moody “Macy’s Day Parade” is charming in
its own unique way. But Armstrong and the band seem to want to try
new roads musically, and they’re not quite sure how to handle the
terrain. A perfect example of this is “Misery,” a gypsy-like track
that is extremely hard to listen to — not because of its lyrical
content, but because the instrumentation is rough. “Blood, Sex And
Booze” doesn’t quite feel comfortable in its musical skin, either;
this is a song waiting to bust out in a barrage of power chords,
but Armstrong never gives it the chance.
The majority of
Warning is best described as a “with-the-winds” album. On a
good day, tracks like “Fashion Victim” and “Waiting” can be
appreciated; on a bad day, they fall flat.
Warning, if anything, is guilty of being inconsistent,
leaving songs like these floating in the breeze.
Maybe this is the kind of album you need to listen to about 20
times to really break it in. But straight out of the box,
Warning is two parts pain to one part pleasure. If this is
what happens to punk rockers when they get older, then bands like
Blink 182 should study this album and know what to avoid when they
hit this plateau.