| 1039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours | review #2 | 1990 |
| Kerplunk! | review #2 | 1991 |
| Dookie | review #2 | review #3 | 1994 |
| Insomniac | review #2 | review #3 | 1995 |
| Nimrod | 1997 |
| Warning | review #2 | 2000 |
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COMMENTS
The most original/great song by Green Day is Brain Stew. Too bad I learned today that is a ripoff of Chicago's 25 or 6 to 4. Why would anyone want to listen to this band, given the existance of Ramones, is beyond my comprension.
(Philip Maddox's review)
A compilation of their debut LP and some early EPs and a compilation cut. They sound a little like the more famous Green Day, but Billie Joe sounds like he's trying to be a heartthrob here, swearing only on the Operation Ivy cover "Knowledge" and singing "teenager in love" type lyrics. The group is still learning at this point, though, and a lot of songs are underwritten, underdeveloped, and sloppy as a result. "Green Day", "Rest", "Only Of You", and "The One I Want" are just a few of these underdeveloped cuts.
Some of the material is so strong that it nearly makes up for it, though. Some of the most fantastically catchy tunes of Green Day's career are here - my favorite is "Going To Pasalacqua", featuring great vocal hooks and a catchy riff. "1000 Hours" and "Dry Ice", from the 1,000 Hours EP, both rule. Those dang songs get stuck in my head all day. "Paper Lanterns" is one of the catchiest songs I've ever heard, in fact. I could go on. Actually, about half of this material is really good, but the other half is kinda boring. There is plenty of good material here, but you have to be willing to dig it out of the 19 tracks included here. If you're willing to do that, you can cut this down to a damn good 40 minute album. Otherwise, please proceed immediately to Dookie.
Green Day's independent first release 39/Smooth was later reissued as 1039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours, and consisted of that album, plus two EPs Slappy and 1,000 Hours, and a compilation cut "I Want To Be Alone" to close things out, hence the collection's title. Overall, the whole package has a few very good moments, like the catchy hooks of "Going To Pasalacqua", "Paper Lanterns", and "Knowledge", but the majority of it is a jumbled mess of generic and dull garage rock songs (I guess this is the 90s answer to the early career of the Kinks). "409 In Your Coffeemaker", "Dry Ice", "Why Do You Want Him?", "At The Library", and "I Was There" are just a few of these forgettable tracks. This album also includes an actual song titled "Green Day" (not that it's good), which was written when the band was called Sweet Children, and the title convinced them to change their name. The songwriting here is of course very undeveloped and basic, so it was very much a mistake to include a torturous 56 minutes of mostly boring material that, with a few exceptions, hardly even shows potential
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(Philip Maddox's review)
Shorter than the last one, but not any more consistent - you still get both great stuff and absolute crap in approximately equal quantities. Actually, it's probably a little less consistent - a good number of these numbers just slide on by me with no hope of ever sticking to me, no matter how many times I hear 'em. I'm pointing at side 2 in particular here - most of the songs aren't bad, but blend into a uniform sludge. Side 1 has some primo stuff, though, especially the opening "2000 Light Years Away", a pop song that I would put among the best ever penned. So damned catchy. Excellent tune.
The follow up, "One For The Razorbacks", is just as catchy, featuring an amazingly great verse melody. Even "Private Ale" is a wondeful pop (notice how I always use the word 'pop'? Green Day is a pop band that plays loud - a good pop band, usually, but certainly not very punk) song that sticks in my head. Plus, you get the original version of "Welcome To Paradise", which isn't as good as the famous version on Dookie, but still quite good. This album also includes their debut EP (back when they were still called the Sweet Children), which is pretty worthless except for a cool cover of "My Generation". Oh well. Just like the last album, you have to dig for the gems, but they are there. Just ignore about half of the album and you'll be OK. In fact, take your favorite tunes from this and the last album and you've got a really good one on your hands. Just a suggestion, mind you.
Green Day's second album, while still a bit too unfocused and dull, is a somewhat noticeable improvement over their first, with more hooks than what came before, and some nice energy and youthfulness. The opening "2,000 Light Years Away" is one of their first bonafide great pop songs, Mike Dirnt's country-ish ditty "Dominated Love Slave" is a hilarious moment of inspired songwriting, "Christie Road" grinds along with a great emotional insecurity, "One Of My Lies" is a prelude to Dookie with a nice pop-punk melody, and the closing cover of The Who's "My Generation" is well done and a reminder of just how great that anthemic song really is. The remainder of the album, however, isn't really anything special, but for the first time, there's a good amount promise throughout, and it wouldn't be long before the band's big breakthrough.
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(Philip Maddox's review)
Green Day's commercial breakthrough and major label debut is also their first truly consistent album. OK, not fully consistent - "Chump" and "Coming Clean" do next to nothing for me - but close enough to be a fully enjoyable album. The production is much louder and cleaner, making the album much better to crank up and headbang to than the earlier two. Plus, the group finally knows what they should sound like, so the songs all sound developed and confident. Some of these tunes are good enough to convince anyone that Green Day does have a knack for knocking out catchy pop songs.
The singles, "Welcome To Paradise", "Longview", "When I Come Around", "Basket Case", and "She" are all great, but some of the non hits are just as great. My favorite song on here is the unbelievably catchy "Emenius Sleepus", which has one of the catchiest choruses that I've ever heard, and a killer guitar riff to boot. The opening blast of "Burnout" and "Having A Blast" will stick with you for a while, as will the cool verse structure of "Sassafrass Roots", which has some clever lyrics to boot ("So why are you alone - WASTING YOUR TIME/When You could be with me - WASTING YOUR TIME?"). Even the closing "F.O.D." is great, with a catchy acoustic bit leading into a great harder bit. This is a 90s pop classic, and if you're willing to take a chance on a pop/punk band like Green Day, you should enjoy it quite a bit.
Green Day's breakthrough album, Dookie is an influential release in the alternative pop/rock sphere, but it is also one of the more highly overrated albums in existence. The singles are quite impressive, however, as "Longview" (one of the more obvious Green Day songs about masturbation with a fantastic bassline and killer energy in the chorus), "Basket Case" (convincing punk energy for the insane asylums), and "When I Come Around" (an overly simplistic riff and kind of stupid Generation X lyrics here, but still very catchy nonetheless) completely dominated alternative radio. Dookie also has a significantly better songwriting consistency than the last two albums, with nice melodies in the singles and tracks like "Burnout", "Welcome To Paradise", and the closing "F.O.D." (a solid melodic triumph with a nice acoustic intro and a great heavier section), but a lot of the songs are still too simplistic and even grating sometimes for this album to be anywhere near greatness. It still serves as good fun, however.
This is undoubtedly Green Day's best album and most successful; it's full of commercialized alternative punk songs. This is the album that pushed Green Day into the mainstream and gained them tons of popularity (probably one of the top bands of 1995). It's easy to see why they were so popular; the hits on this album are irresistible catchy punk songs with plenty of hooks like "Longview", "She", "Basket Case", and "When I Come Around". They are really compact and tight songs, but the same doesn't go for all of the other album tracks though. The catchy "Welcome To Paradise", the opener "Burnout", and "In The End" are fairly good, but the rest is surprisingly mediocre - songs like "Sassafras Roots", "Coming Clean", "Emenius Sleepus", and "Chump" are all mindless punk; they are nothing but short unmelodic tunes. On the good hand though, the popular songs are intelligently placed all over the album, which keeps Dookie from falling flat on it's face.
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(Philip Maddox's review)
The follow up to Dookie sounds pretty much the same, the only real differences being that a few songs are in minor keys and that the album is less consistent. This time, there are a few fillers that drift by without ever needing to be heard again - "86", "Westbound Sign", "No Pride", and "Stuck With Me" don't really do much. Plus, the highs here aren't quite as high as the last album. Those complaints aside, though, anyone who enjoyed the last album is sure to enjoy this one as well. I love "Geek Stink Breath" quite a bit - it's got an awesome, pounding guitar riff that drills its way into your brain. "Brain Stew" and "Jaded", the combined most successful single from the album, is catchy catchy catchy. The "Jaded" part moves along extremely well and is sure to get you headbanging. The opening 2 cuts groove along like the best stuff on Dookie, which says quite a bit. The album closing "Walking Contradiction" ends things on a goofy, excellent note. Basically, if you really loved Dookie, you'll like this and should pick it up if you have some extra cash sometime.
Green Day's all-important follow up to Dookie was a somewhat less commercial sounding, heavier, faster, tighter and more consistent album than before, although it was considerably less successful. Clocking in at less than 33 minutes, the key qualities of Insomniac are energy, speed, and complete insanity. This record definitely has those in abundance. There are great, hard, and basic rock and roll tunes with pretty cool, fun melodies, like "Brat", "Tight Wad Hill", and "Panic Song" (the latter complete with an awesome bass intro and solid buildup) that are some of the more exciting and convincing songs of their career.
Sure, Billie Joe Armstrong's guitar work, singing, and lyrics certainly aren't anything to get excited about, but the talented rhythm section of bassist Mike Dirnt and drummer Tre Cool really comes to the forefront here. Also, the hit singles continue to be impressive quality, with "Geek Stink Breath" being harshly melodic, "Walking Contradiction" having some messed up lyrics going along with its' melody, "Brain Stew" having a riff so simplistic it actually adds to the song's enjoyability, and it's counterpart "Jaded" is the fastest and most exciting one and a half minutes on the album. Not everything here is exactly good, although the weaker songs often go by so fast that they often disguise the lack of melody and frequently same-sounding guitar work, making this arguably the band's best effort yet.
This is basically a rewrite of Dookie, because nothing has really changed; it's the same faceless 3-chord (other punk bands can make good use of these 3 chords though) alternative punk with a lack of interesting hooks and melodies. The bad thing though is that the filler (and there is quite a bit of it) on here, is even worse than it was on Dookie. The list is almost endless: "Stuck With Me", "Geek Stink Breath", "86", "Armatage Shanks", "Westbound Sign", etc(!)...I really don't see anything remotely entertaining about these tracks at all. They are hook-less, mindless, generic, and same-sounding punk songs that really ruin this album, because they take up about half of the songs on this release.
On the good side though, the hits are 'almost' as good before; "Brain Stew" is a memorable song that was sure to be a hit because it has a different tempo than anything else on here, and a freaking easy riff, "Jaded" is just fun and fast, and "Walking Contradiction" is a nice midtempo punk song. These songs are all placed towards the end of this album, so they don't save Insomniac from mediocrity. Their are a few entertaining songs though such as "Brat" (the most memorable of the non-hit songs), "Bab's Uvula Who?", and "Panic Song" (a long one for them), which although not first-rate tunes, they give the album some good moments. Overall, their is way too much filler on here to even make this an average album.
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(reviewed by Philip Maddox)
Green Day tries to branch out a little bit here, and most of it succeeds. The group wants to try every type of pop there is here, so the album ends up having 18 tracks. Predictably, not every one works ("King For A Day", the groups attempt at ska, sucks really, REALLY bad; a lot of the generic pop attempts scattered throughout the disc are decent, but don't demand repeated listening; "Prosthetic Head" is a rather weak way to end the album; "Take Back" isn't really the best attempt at hardcore punk I've ever heard), but a lot of them do, and that says a lot. The songs in the traditional Green Day style ("Nice Guys Finish Last", "The Grouch", "Uptight", and "Jinx") sound like the best material off the last albums.
Some of the variations work quite well, too - the popular ballad "Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life)" is quite pretty, in fact. I like it quite a bit. "Walking Alone" and "All The Time" are both catchy pop songs, the former featuring a harmonica, of all things. There's even a Pet Sounds-ish instrumental here ("Last Ride In"), and I actually like it as much as the instrumentals on that album - it's very pleasant and nice and such. There's still too much filler for this to be a great album, but the highlights make this a worthy purchase.
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(Nick Karn's review)
Ah, it's so nice to hear a sometimes painfully run of the mill punk pop band that occasionally will write extremely catchy gems with loads of filler actually attempt to evolve a little bit. After their first attempt at this didn't go over all that well commercially apart from the unexpected smash of "Time Of Your Life", I would imagine the three guys started to rethink their position a little bit. Not so much completely reinvent themselves, but put enough effort into the approach of melodies, song structure, and variety of their previously existing sound, regardless of whether the zillions of people who originally bought Dookie actually liked it or not. The end result is, other than their hits compilation (which does prove from top-to-bottom how truly excellent a singles band they really are), perhaps their most consistently hook-filled, enjoyable effort to date. And filled with conviction, too. Rebelling against authority! Woohoo!
Granted, not everything on the album is phenomenal or anything, as should be expected of a Green Day outing - the traditional formulaic tune "Deadbeat Holiday" blatantly steals the melodies of both "Nice Guys Finish Last" and some song on Dookie I can't remember at this minute, making it a completely pointless retread, "Misery" (despite the inventive presence of organ) plods a bit boringly and is a little overlong at five minutes plus (which is like a prog epic by this band's standards!) and "Jackass" pretty much escapes me outside of the sax solo(!), even though it's lyrically excellent. Heck, even the lead single "Warning" rips off most of the bassline and tempo from the Kinks' Village Green classic "Picture Book" (as the comment below rightly mentions), though it does have one of the catchiest hooks of the whole album and a lyrical slant all its' own, so it's still somewhat good.
But everywhere else, the great catchiness of a lot of this material frequently pleases my ears. "Church On Sunday" and "Castaway" technically aren't that much more than standard pop-punk, but damn it, this band is good and engaging at that type of thing. Both sound exciting and tight enough to get your energy going, with stick-in-your-head hooks, particularly the great punkish tempo of the latter. "Blood, Sex & Booze" and "Fashion Victim" both embody the rather effective lyrical approach for this album well, and the former is even based on the entertaining, entirely non-punk groove of something like "Hitchin' A Ride". But there's other quirks in the songs, too - with its' harmonica lead, driving acoustic guitars and insanely catchy straightforwardness, "Hold On" really sounds like A Hard Day's Night tune modernized for the altpunk crowd.
The smartest move the band makes on this album, though, is to close it off with three huge hit singles. What a novel idea. But seriously, "Waiting", "Minority" and "Macy's Day Parade" are all among the best songs in Green Day's canon, so that certainly makes the listening experience more satisfying. The first of these is a fabulous acoustic to electric pop song that's smoothly flowing, introspective, and mature, in complete contrast to the following one, which certainly has the punkish, snotty spirit of a lot of earlier material, but even that one's more developed instrumentally, with a fantastic bassline and 'harmonious' backing textures. And as for "Macy's Day Parade", well, that one might be the most, dare I say, beautiful and affecting song they've ever come up with. It's probably the pinnacle of the album too - what a great longing, almost depressing, sort of melody. And the album as a whole, while still a little inconsistent, is worth your while - consider it a very high 7 to Insomniac's middling one.
Yes, I'm reviewing Green Day. Satan probably has icicles in his beard right now. Well, out of the modern punk-pop bands, Green Day is hands-down the best and my favorite. What's even better, they've grown up. This whole album has less profanity and innuendo than the song Longview. There's a little variety, some extra instrumentation, and just an overall more pleasing feel to everything from here. Plus, all of it is pretty catchy. There's also been an obvious change in tone here. Instead of songs about masturbating and goodness alone knows what else, we get stuff that's still scornful and rebellious, but all of it seems tempered now with the maturity that only comes from tough times. For example, Jackass's words are so.....I don't know how to quite articulate it. Fed-up, longing, jealous, angry, empassioned, and hurt all in one.
Of course, Green Day is Green Day, so you still get plenty of nice, adolescent stuff. The title track is pretty rebellious topically, but the winner here would certainly be Minority, which contains 90% of the profanity on the album, most of the sick content, and a large portion of the rebellious spirit. It's as if they decided to make one song the ultra-"rude" one, and focus on making the rest catchier and better. It worked, too. I really can't name a high point; it's all pretty even and good.
Do check out the acoustic Macy's Day Parade, the Farfisa organ in Misery, the sax solo in Jackass, and the social commentary (which I totally agree with) in Fashion Victim. The song is basically a pointed attack on the label-jockeys of my generation.....heck, Sears brand clothes are good enough for me as long as they're comfy. Except for shoes. They have to be nice, but that's only because Nike and Addidas make good shoes. I'm no expert on "early" Green Day, but nothing here is too complex if you still love three-chord rockers. However, Green Day is growing up, and I like what I hear.
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COMMENTS
Am I the only one who's noticed that the song "Warning" is a ripoff of The Kinks' "Picture Book"?
After awhile I get sick of people complaining about bands ripping other people off! Out of the millions of songs there are out there, someone is bound to rip off another riff by accident. I'm sure Green Day wasn't aware they were ripping off that Kinks song when they made warning.
Anyway this is one of Green Days best albums. It took awhile for me to think it was better than insomniac. I might be a big music fan and most music fans don't think Green Day are that great but if you really think about it these guys are really smart and talented songwriters. I mean I know there arent complicated solos and stuff but most of the songwriting is really good. There are a ton of great songs here such as blood sex and booze, church on sunday, castaway, misery, waiting, minority, and macy's day parade. There is nothing wrong with the other songs its just that these other songs really catch my attention.
Another reason why I really started liking Green Day was because they hate rap metal and anyone whos says that is a friend of mine. If you're looking for good times and parties look for their other albums.
I liked Warning when I got it, but at repeated listens (ok, they were quite a lot, but not by my standards) bored me. There is some song (I don't remember which one, maybe Waiting or Minority) which steals the harmonica line of Beatles' "I Should Have Known Better". Macy's Day Parade Sounds way TOO Much like Stand By Me (at least, the beggining of the John Lennon cover sound like it, but the fourth chord in Stand By Me has a 7th and the same chord of Macy's Day Parade doesn't, besides that, they're identical in tempo,notes and the way the strings are strummed)
Ryan Chartier says that perhaps they've found the same riff casually. That, or they ripped it unconsciously (or consciously). It may happen. When Paul McCartney wrote Yesterday (after "waking up"), he played to lots of people and asked them if they knew what song it was. Because he wasn't sure if he had written it or if he had heard it.
¡It happened to me! I was playing guitar, and found a wacky chord combo: A minor, then F# minor. Sadly, that's a rip of Morning Bell. So, when someone says some song rips something, that doesn't imply it was done on purpose, but go to listen I Should Have Known Better and Stand By Me, and say I'm wrong.
Sorry for the mistakes, Nicolás from Argentina
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