Originally published by L.S. Media. September 25th 2012.
Away from the last two Rock Opera specific albums that Green Day produced, the American band always managed to produce very good albums without straying too far from they stood for. Dookie was very cool and its follow up of Insomniac a step up to the big league.
This is the first of three albums due out in the next few months and worries that the group that bought such excellent songs as Wake Me Up When September Ends, the phenomenal Jesus of Suberbia and 21 Guns, have taken on a project too far look founded and it is enough to make a stone heart weep and their detractors making even louder noises of derision.
The dilemma with Uno is that it has the pretence to be grown up, a reverse in direction for the band, as far away from the world of St. Jimmy and the pathos of disaffected American youth in search of a modern day counter culture. In the end though, it has the outward appearance of the worst of self righteous indignation of a semi-rebellious adolescent kicking out of an establishment that they helped to create. The political attitude that Green Day showed so well in 21st Century Breakdown and the outstanding American Idiot has been replaced, the old ideal displaced by something less interesting, slicker, more insipid and in the case of the song Kill The DJ, a amore frenzied attack on culture. It is something The Smiths did but with more style and grace.
At the end of the day, it just doesn’t feel like Green Day, sure you can’t mistake the superb bass guitar of Mike Dirnt which is still a major plus on an album that has all the hallmarks of a debut album by a band that has just left college, not a band that has grown in immense stature and whose lyrics have become entwined with the utter alienation, political and personal, felt by many on both sides of the Atlantic.
Of course no band should rest on their laurels and new boundaries are there to be explored, but if you are going to distance yourself from what made you stand out as one of the 21st century greats and revert to sub-standard version then you have to ask yourself; was it worth it? Uno? It’s only just better than that!
Ian D. Hall