Review Summary: Green Day sticks to the same formula as iUno! and iDos! and the result is as surprising as Billie Joe's rehab visit.
Green Day isn't doing so hot with this trilogy release. What started off as a mediocre release with iUno! has now spiraled into something so trivial and pointless that it's basically a joke. "What's that? Another Green Day album? Oh boy."
At first, the albums were meant to be released two months apart. Billie Joe Armstrong decided to freak out and go to rehab so the band had to cancel their tour for the releases and moved the gap between each album to about a month apart for each. This may be great for the 13-year old in all of us, but for the most part the music industry isn't going to ever be able to take Green Day seriously. As much as one can try to distance this album from Green Day's previous releases, it's nearly if not fully impossible.
Having just heard iDos! about a month ago, iTré! just sounds like the B-Sides to an already overplayed poppy mess. While Green Day can claim that they're just trying to have fun and create a garage-sounding trilogy off of their riches gained from a musical (yes, for those of you lucky enough to not know, Green Day had their best album turned into a stage musical). The claims are fun and innocent in intent, but the result is anything but. Having tried as hard as I can to be unbiased in reviewing and critiquing iTré!, I just can't do it. Everything Green Day has done in 2012 effects this album and the way listeners will perceive it. So let's get down to brass tacks and see what iTré! has to offer.
The lyrics aren't anything spectacular, the instrumentals and vocals are lazy, the performance just feels forced. This can be said for any of the albums in the Green Day trilogy, but can especially be said for iTré! as absolutely nothing has changed for the better, and the upbeat feeling that the band at least attempted to display in iDos! is practically dead on arrival.
To be fair, some songs stick out. X-Kid opens well enough, reminding me of something that would come off of Warning. The lyrics are somewhat lacking, but hey, it's Green Day. The song Dirty Rotten Bastards feels as if it’s trying to be something like the medleys off of American Idiot and falls flat, ending up being nothing but a repetitive mess. The album opens with the song Brutal Love and it just feels as if it goes in one ear and out the other. Nothing too special. While some songs stick out, I can't say I really loved
anything the songs did. Not a single section in any song made me say "Ah, good ol' Green Day still has it." Not one. There won't be any tracks I go back to listen to by themselves, and the album itself has little to no replayability. This is a sad thing to realize for someone such as myself, who grew up on Green Day.
I guess we could blame the mediocrity on Billie Joe's substance abuse? Maybe the reason this album fails because Green Day was trying to go for a "garage pop" sound and by forcing the erm...talent, they fell short of expectations. Hell, we could even say that Green Day just wants to be taken off the map and this is their farewell from the mainstream. Maybe they
want to be perceived as failures and make a comeback album in a year or two that will be heralded as the second coming of American Idiot. One can only hope.
As of right now, this is the final Green Day release coming out for a while if we ignore the DVD release scheduled for...whenever, that is cleverly entitled iQuatro! and will finally feature Green Day's "fourth" member, Jason White, on the cover. I guess that's as good of an excuse as any. Green Day, I hope you get the act together and get one good hit out of this whole mess. Oh wait, it's already over. I guess it's best to say better luck next time.
