GREEN DAY Saviors
Punk-pop masters return to formula, sprinkling Gallagher.
Once more back to basics, dear friends. Green Day may have strayed a little from the path to Welcome To Paradise over the past three decades — into punk opera, grandiose rock balladry or, as on 2020’s last album ‘Father Of All Motherfuckers’, garage rock’n’roll — but eventually they always steer back into their melodic punk hammer lane. Frontman Billie Joe Armstrong has described ‘Saviors’, their fourteenth album, as bridging the gap between 1994’s ‘Dookie’ and 2004’s ‘American Idiot’, and there it certainly sits, part hurtling punkarama, part political rock drama. It’s a style that Green Day pioneered and epitomise, and they don’t wander too far from it.
Opener and first single The American Dream Is Killing Me, held over from ‘Father…’ to avoid making that album too political, firmly stakes out the territory. ‘My country under siege,’ Armstrong sings in his gung-ho punk bawl, pinpointing the issues of unemployment, homelessness and conspiracy acceptance, over swashbuckling stadium punk and chamber-pop interludes. But this touch of American Idiot political charge doesn’t stampede across the album. Strange Days Are Here To Stay, Living In The ’20s and the full-throttle Coma City — power -punk tracks as catchy as Green Day have ever been — reference widespread racism, gun violence and the billionaire space race (or “assholes in space”, as Armstrong puts it succinctly). Otherwise, ‘Saviors’ is as personal as a therapy confession.
Emotionally the record ricochets from the Weezer-like meet-cute , full of first-flush romance, to far darker fare. is pure vengeance, a wronged Armstrong declaring ‘vendetta is a friend of mine’ and telling his adversary to ‘get on your knees, you are kissing my ring’. Dilemma appears to confront the demons at the bottom of the bottle: ‘I was sober, now I’m drunk, bouncing from the walls of a ‘rubber room’ for his own protection, punk’s most famous basket case finally tipping over the edge.
