Green Day - Revolution Radio (2016)
If someone were to seriously ask me what a midlife crisis was, I'd have to point them to this album. This album sounds like Green Day embracing a bit of their older sound with trademarks of their newer shit, like the high-pitched "oooh"'s in the background for melodies, but despite a few good songs on here, like "Bang Bang", the title track, and the new fan-favorite "Ordinary World", it just sounds so uninspired. Take "Young Blood" for example.. Haven't Green Day made this song before? Just how long did it take them to write this tune, lyrically and melodically? I'm sure that if you asked the band, their response would be something like "can you believe we only wrote this song in 10 minutes?!" and I'd fucking believe it. It's just.. Ugh. Don't get me wrong, this album has a few tracks that are worth checking out, but let's address the obvious elephant in the room regarding this album:
I very well might be wrong, but as far as I know, this is the first Green Day album that has been exclusively-produced by the band, without any outside help, and Goddammit, it fucking shows. The guitars are WAY too loud compared to everything else in the music, the vocals are pretty drowned out, and the use of dynamics is -awful- on this album: There are plenty of times, typically at the beginning of songs, that it'll start out quiet, and you're thinking "I can't hear this shit!" and go to turn the volume up a hair, only to be fucking DEAFENED when the electric guitar riff kicks in. I am NOT opposed to audible dynamics, but you have to realize how fucking night-and-day these songs are mixed at times, which almost makes it a painful album to hear all the way through, if you're not paying complete attention to the volume level. You have to develop a fucking STRATEGY to listen to this album, and it's not even that good! Fuck! Their fanbase will even try to defend it by saying stupid shit like "Green Day has always played fast and loud, I don't see what the problem is." which is true but it wasn't fucking MIXED AS BADLY AS THIS before, was it? That's the entire complaint, isn't it? Ah, a lot of Green Day's fans, if they could, would run around with their heads pointed upwards, mouth open, to try to capture some of the band's piss as they urinate over a balcony. Fucking moronic.
This album just makes the band sound so fucking tired, dude. You can hear in Billie Joe Armstrong's voice that he probably wakes up and (more days than not) wants to hang up the whole pop-punk thing for a solo acoustic career or something, maybe a Bob Dylan cover album. I don't know, I'm sure he has a lot of passion for punk rock and its subgenres because it's been basically his entire life, but the band just doesn't sound that passionate anymore about their craft on this album, with the music getting across this feeling that they probably felt like they had to write a few more good songs, churn out a few mediocre (but not offensively-bad) tunes over some weekends, and then relax, because they don't have to write another album for three or so years. You can only make so many punk tunes before you sound like a bunch of middle-aged dudes living for the weekend just so they can get drunk at a Taco Cabana, and dammit, this just isn't right.
6/10
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Read about this album on Wikipedia! Great stuff to read while on the toilet! Yeah!
