Album Review: Green Day - ¡Tre!

In the interest of full disclosure: this reviewer hasn't followed Green Day's progress in years. In fact, since 2004's bigwig-baiting American Idiot was burning up the charts interest has been completely lost. But there has been a successful Broadway musical, an average Rock Band edition, another record and a live DVD. The fact that all this had to be looked up is probably more down to my waning interest in commercialised punk rock than anything else, but it has to be said that the lads probably lost their renewed grip on relevancy a while ago.

Either way, we now have Tre; the final chapter in a trilogy (the first two chapters obviously titled Uno and Dos) released over the course of the last four months. It comes hot on the heels of Armstrong's recent (and very public) meltdown and subsequent stint in rehab for substance abuse, but if the pint-sized frontman has been hitting the sauce it certainly hasn't affected a propensity to pen his trademark variety of punk pop tunes. The record starts promisingly enough with the Costello-esque Brutal Love, but unfortunately it dissolves pretty quickly into a collection of songs that sound like… well… Green Day. Which begs the question: did anyone really need more than 30 of these? Packaged and sold three times over? Could they have whittled them down to make one good album as opposed to a trio of average ones? Who knows. At the end of the day the trilogy feels more like an attempt to mask a dearth of social currency with volume not quality. And just because you can do that it doesn't mean that you should.