Green Day - Uno LP (Pink Vinyl), Dos LP (Blue Vinyl) & Tre LP (Yellow Vinyl), a photo by Tim PopKid on Flickr.
Green Day is still a band that I hold pretty near and dear to my heart. Despite the fact that they constantly have pushed the envelope into territory that I don't want to hear, I'll never completely be able to let go of the band that wrote "2000 Light Years Away." This 3LP set, released over a span of several months was billed as Green Day returning to form. After meandering with American Idiot and releasing the god awful 21st Century Breakdown, I was hopeful that Green Day would release an album with some pop-punk songs on it.
In general, they succeeded. Over the course of these 3 albums are some of the best songs that the band has released in over a decade. Unfortunately they also contain some of the worse. Each record was presented under the guise that they would represent different styles of music. These differences are subtle at best. I can't see any sort of thematic element that differentiates one from the other. I'm not sure the band does either as they moved one of the songs "Drama Queen" from the 2nd album to the 3rd album during production. The CD and Digital buyers saw that change. On vinyl, you get the song twice, once on Dos and once on Tre. Plus the song Stray Heart is omitted completely.
What really strikes me on these records are the lyrics and how terrible they are in places. I can't understand why Billie Joe would need to write so many songs just littered with swearing. It's not clever and the last thing I really want to hear is a 73 year old (or however old Billie Joe is these days) singing about how it's "Fuck Time." Their lyrics were not this juvenile 20 years ago,
Hot Topic (I know, I know) was the only place you could pick up the colored vinyl variants of these records. Uno and Dos were limited to 1500 copies. Tre was limited to 1000. If you can say the words limited in the same sentence as a pressing run that large.
You really could cobble together the best Green Day record in an age by plucking the best off of each album for a greatest hits deal. But the sheer amount of songs over these 3 albums makes it impossible to not have an awful lot of filler (or a lot of awful filler, either works). Green Day works best when they're cranking out simple pop-punk. Their constant desire to do something epic and sprawling is what's keeping them from being that band that I'm still trying to hold dear.
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