Green Day: Saviors (1/26/2024)

Green Day: Saviors [Reprise, 2024] I listened to the great comeback record on Voting Day, sitting in a library, putting on some lousy earbuds and getting to work. Appropriate, I guess, for a band who railed that railed against authority for a good part of the last twenty years. It’s also appropriate that the aptly titled “The American Dream Is Killing Me” opens the record, a political statement going back to the basics set by American Idiot. Opening with the kind of loud, statement-making guitar riffs that open the aforementioned record, it’s easily a musical apology for the band’s last album, the unfairly maligned Father of All…, which, despite carrying some filler (“Graffitia” may always make me cringe), had high points that Saviors will never hit, now or in twenty years. Saviors is a direction change. With frequent vague references to ‘20s-to-’50s pop culture and Joe Strummer-aping vocals from Armstrong, you could say this is the classicist album every band releases at some point. The album where, in a desperate search for inspiration, the ship is steered back to the ‘70s or the ‘80s or whenever the members think that all the classics came out. It is certainly indebted to its influences, with the Oasis carbon-copy title track and the modern-day Stones update on “Corvette Summer.” But what about Green Day? No, the real Green Day, the ones that cranked out classics, real classics, without the faux-high-school poetry and the retroism? Without the fifteen attempts at anthems? The closest you’ll get here is “Look Ma! No Brains,” and “Strange Days Are Here To Stay,” the latter being a rewrite of American Idiot’s “Letterbomb,” minus the real feelings and the real pain that made it such a great song. One could say this of the album itself, in comparison to American Idiot. “Welcome to my problems / It’s not an invitation,” sings Billie Joe Armstrong on “Dilemma.” American Idiot welcomed you to its problems, and you never figured them out, either. It’s when you can say everything about a song in a line that short that takes away the pain that’s supposed to be there (it’s the 2020s, you know?) but isn’t. Look, if they wanted to make a record about late-career confusion, then they can be my guests. But the motive behind this project is unclear at best. Hey, at least Nimrod was contractual. [4.3/10]