Green Day redeems themselves with third album of trilogy (Well…kind of)

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Written by Claire Schroeder

After thirty five songs, a Clear Channel embarrassment, broken instruments and a trip to rehab, Green Day’s ¡Uno!, ¡Dos!, ¡Tre! experiment is coming to its close. Sure, they plan to continue with their tour when Billie Joe Armstrong feels up to it, but the rest of the world (i.e. the billions of non-ticketholders) can finally move on from this whole project, now that ¡Tre! is out in the open.

While it still carries the easily identifiable Green Day sound, ¡Tre! has a sense of freshness and originality that the other two in the trilogy altogether lack. Also, unlike the two before, this album does not present any one song that can be described as truly terrible by an unbiased listener. The album has some musical diversity, but it does not get quite as experimentally outrageous as ¡Dos!, which contains the perplexing and ridiculous “Nightlife.”

In fact, not only is the album not terrible, but it has some songs that could appeal to listeners outside of their normal group of fans. One such song is “Dirty Rotten Bastards,” which restores youth to the band’s catalogue. While they clearly strived to appear young and energetic in ¡Uno! and ¡Dos!, ¡Tre! is the first of the three to achieve the energy without seeming desperate and strained. However, the energy created does not last through the entire album, as the band presumably wants it to. “99 Revolutions,” for example, occurs so late in the album that any momentum and enthusiasm for a proper reception has already been sucked up by “Dirty Rotten Bastards.”

Apart from the half-hearted attempt at motivating the listener with “99 Revolutions,” the album still has a few nice moments. It presents several softer songs, such as “Drama Queen,” and “The Forgotten,” and the band taps into their Country-Blues side with “Brutal Love.”

Perhaps the most refreshing characteristic of this album is that it does not try to force much of anything down the listener’s throat. The last two albums offered too much repetition of pulsing and distorted chords, with little variation in the chord structure. And where ¡Uno! and ¡Dos! suffered musically, they completely collapsed, lyrically. ¡Tre! redeems those two, with somewhat more appealing lyrics and enough variety in sound to merit listening through the entire album.

Favorite Lyric: “What the f*** does OK stand for?”

Rating: W-P-2/3
R-I-Y-L: Weezer, Social Distortion, Blink-182
Top Tracks: “Dirty Rotten Bastards,” “Drama Queen,” “Walk Away” 

Listen to “Walk Away” Below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKaGPE0LEHE

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