I really had low expectations for Father of All…, but I was completely blindsided by how profoundly terrible Green Day’s most recent showing was.
After their heyday in the ‘90s and hitting their creative peak in 2004 with the release of one of the most important contributions to culture in American Idiot, the band has struggled to gracefully pass into the next stage of their careers. 21st Century Breakdown came out to mixed reviews and the set of three albums (¡Uno!, ¡Dos and ¡Tre) was unforgettable at best.
ITAL Revolution Radio seemed like a fun step in the right direction with simple, in your face punk rock that didn’t take itself too seriously. With Father of All, however, all progress is out the window. It’s really that bad.
Where do I start with the thirteenth studio album from the legendary alternative rock group Green Day? Should I talk about the overblown instrumentation or should I discuss the Peter Pan syndrome lyrics? Maybe I could even talk about the fact that 80% of the songs sound exactly the same.
The album stumbles right out of the gate. The opening track title track has an admittedly catchy chorus, but that’s where the positive qualities end. The guitars are over-compressed, the drums are completely lifeless and most likely sequenced in a computer, and the vocals have a tinny reverb on them that makes the mix almost unlistenable on my apple earbuds. The falsetto introduction is really annoying but luckily doesn’t last too long. The next song, “Fire, Ready, Aim,” is more of the same. The track carries the same “blonde chick power walking in high heels” feeling that the previous track does.
The third track, “Oh yeah!,”feels like a parody of a Green Day song. It’s a completely overproduced mess with no flow in between segments of the song. The chorus has a weird electronic synth element that sticks out like a sore thumb and the bridge is the verbal example of the millennial “woah-ing” that went out of style the last time Green Day wrote a good album. It’s an unfunny joke.
I did like the track “Meet Me on the Roof.”It felt like a Green Day take on ‘50s Rock N’ Roll / Motown that I didn’t know I wanted. It’s fun and youthful in a way that doesn’t sound like a Hillary with a skateboard meme. It’s a relatively well-produced track (besides some seemingly unintentional distortion of a drum fill) and features a fun baseline from Mike Dirnt.
Although Green Day commits several cardinal sins of songwriting and flagrantly ignores all principles of constructing a good album, I think the fact that it seems like they tried to write the same song 10 times in a row is the most unbearable. When I hit track 8, which was only 20 minutes in, I began feeling physically ill and started thinking about why the ITAL Newswire doesn’t offer health insurance.
Father of All starts off bad and somehow ends even worse. I would love to see them make that jump into the next stage of their career with some fun music but the wait is going to continue. I usually end with a good activity the songs pair with so here’s this: set one of the songs to play as your alarm goes off in the morning. I would recommend “Graffitia.”
In conclusion, no.
0/5
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