Album Review: Green Day - ¡Dos!

Second in Green Day's ambitious trilogy of albums, ¡Dos! doesn't pick up where ¡Uno! left off. Where ¡Uno! was a glossy commercial-sounding record, ¡Dos! is quite the opposite, with the warm guitar tones left behind we are left with a very slickly produced 'garage'-sounding record, with treble-soaked guitars screaming in your ears, making listening for extended periods difficult. The problem with this trilogy is that every song on both albums thus far is undeniably Green Day; Billie Joe's vocals are so profoundly distinct, just like Tre Cool's frenetic drumming patterns are, that each track sounds vaguely, almost too familiar. This is not to say that ¡Dos! is a complete write off. I'm sure that if another band had their clammy hands on some of these tracks they could be reworked and marketed to great success. But the aging punks just can't seem to take them to that next level.

Green Day have soared on the comeback success of American Idiot, which ultimately breathed new life into a band stuck in a rut of mid-tempo, luck-lustre songs. This explains the trilogy – the band are trying to reinvent themselves. Green Day's ultimate flaw is that they sound like Green Day, and though the band have embarked upon an ambitious project, they haven't fully committed to pushing their songwriting. On ¡Dos! they have played it too safe, and changing the 'sound' of the album doesn't change the perception of the band. There simply aren't any songs on ¡Dos! that will remain in your head days after listening.