Green Day - 'Saviors'

How's this for coincidence? After a terrible week at work, things breaking around the house, finding my few remaining chickens had been murdered by probably another raccoon, and a complete waste of a Saturday morning taking Ethan's car to a mechanic to schedule taking his car to a mechanic next Wednesday, Green Day has a new album called Saviors. Imma be real not happy if it's terrible. But first i need to replace the whole house water filter...

... well shit, the old one was 3/4 but the new one uses 1 inch fittings. Guess i'll eat lunch then go back to town...

... we'll just skip over all of the interveningly insane aggravation that plagued this particular process (there was plenty) and move on to the part of this cursed day that is Green.

What in the world do we want from a Green Day album in 2024? For starters, i want the single quotes around the title to be sarcastically cautionary: 'Saviors.' Actual Punk sensibilities would certainly be welcome, but the last couple albums were not up my alley and i have absolutely no idea what to think now that Billie Joe ditched the Emo makeup and went blonde moptop. Not gonna lie, i preferred them back in the day with colorful hair as, to quote myself, "irascible little snot-rags," but they're in their early 50s now...

The cover is pretty inspiring, though. A pre-teen kid doing the "What, me Worry" shrug with a rock in his hand in front of the neighborhood garbage fire in the middle of the street does nothing if not suggest this album will in some way rock, and the completely obnoxious wall poster/lyric mural is, well, completely obnoxious. So far so good so far as i'm concerned.

Holy hell this is fantastic. No, really, like it has absolutely everything. Philosophically, the album explicitly demarcates the era with the death of Bowie, and i think we all can recognize 2016 as a serious turning point toward whatever direction we're reluctantly facing. Sociopolitically speaking, welcome to the '20s, please enjoy all the hot garbage as the billionaires bankrupt the US so they can blast off into space and leave us to our miserably lonely existence on this dying planet. Make no mistake, "wanna be my boy/girlfriend?" is a bit of a ridiculously sarcastic sentiment in such a context. No wonder it makes no real difference if you drop me off at Urgent Care or the record store (i'll obviously take the latter), we're all going to end up in the insane asylum with robots handing us our daily medication regardless. And yes, in spite of the sincerity with which we beg to be saved, there are no "saviors" to call upon, except of course in the now truly and arcanely old-fashioned sense of aimlessly wandering the outside world and attempting to talk to strangers. 

Musically it has everything all smashed together as well. It's profoundly Green Day in all their manifestations, but there's also decidedly Dropkick Murphys style pub anthems, Weezer-esque nerd monologues, a desperate longing to be woken up after September ends, and ultimately an equally desperate plea for all the dicks who so love to play victim to just. shut. up. already.

Again, i don't know what to make of the new visual image, image is not my thing, and one could feel a bit of over production makes the whole thing feel a little more overweight and sluggish than desirable, but again i remind you we're all middle-aged burnouts in a garbage world we don't like, watching our kids have a war with their grandparents, so in a very specific way it's completely apropos. 

I'm more than satisfied, i'll put 'Saviors' on par with Hackney Diamonds as a shockingly great album from one of the last few great mainstream Rock bands left standing atop the pile of rubble.