Green Day are victims of accidental evolution. Between Dookie and American Idiot, they shifted just enough in texture and composition that the modest, Bay Area-pop-punk trio eventually generated the aura of an imperial rock band. They managed this without ever directly shedding their pop or punk sensibilities, even as their ambitions slipped into the hysterical space of musical theater. Revolution Radio, their first album in four years, following up the miscalculated trilogy ¡UNO!, ¡DOS!, ¡TRÉ!, seems a deliberate reduction in scale. ¡UNO!, ¡DOS!, ¡TRÉ! documented a band without any ideas; it’s an oddly empty, back-to-basics rock album unreasonably contorted over three records. Revolution Radio documents a band with one idea, which is, as far as one can tell, to make a Green Day record, one with fewer indulgences and overarching concepts and more capital-R Rock.
The opener, “Somewhere Now,” has brief flashes of invention; it’s their first opener on any album to evolve from gentle acoustic filigrees into stomping dinosaur rock. It’s designed to resemble the Who’s unhinged compression of styles, but it’s oddly weighted, so that the classic rock schematic is undermined in its execution. “I shop online so I can vote/At the speed of life,” Billie Joe Armstrong sings. His voice has lost some of its body and occupies an insecure, nasal frequency throughout the record, and it’s in this hollow timbre that he delivers most of the album’s lyrical misfires, which are mostly unrelated ideas juxtaposed to sound important or dangerous. “We all die in threes,” he sings, less like a natural end to the song’s chorus and more of a dead end that the melody struggles to recover from. The clichés fail to resolve into a song, and what’s left is a plastic tray littered with “important” rock gestures.
In “Bang Bang,” the first single, Armstrong tries to assume the perspective of a mass shooter who is eager to see their image preserved and multiplied on social media. For the most part, this approach produces incoherent combinations of social media jargon and historical violence. “I got my photobomb,” Armstrong sings. “I got my Vietnam.” The character study, a hypercompressed and retrofitted Natural Born Killers, is neither interesting nor illuminating. The title track is inspired by a Black Lives Matter protest in New York that Armstrong abandoned his car to join. None of the details or the specificities of the protest or its parent movement enter the song; the lyrics instead are generic kodachromes of activism (“Give me cherry bombs and gasoline,” and, “Legalize the truth!”)
There are some signs of animation and ambition: “Outlaws” embeds nostalgia in more nostalgia, shifting between major and minor chords as Armstrong recalls his youth as a “criminal in bloom.” It also moves through its chord changes so inevitably it almost sounds generated by a Green Day ballad algorithm. “Still Breathing” is the most successful melody on the record; the shift from verse to chorus is thrilling, though restricted to the traditional designs of pop-punk, and, as a kind of vague description of survival, it’s Armstrong’s most convincing lyrics on the record.
But Revolution Radio otherwise rarely escapes the Green Day archetype, an established language that, here, feels inelastic and calcified. It misses the living superstructures on American Idiot, the craft-based, Kinks-esque storytelling approach of Warning:, or even the accelerating entropy of ¡UNO!, ¡DOS!, and ¡TRÉ!, which at least tried to shape a collective shrug into something unusual. Revolution Radio feels like the product of three people committed to making the idea of a Green Day record in 2016, but with reduced abilities and without direction. The album cover depicts a portable stereo on fire, which feels like an unintended analogy for the form the band takes on record: burned out, crumbled, warped into an inanimate husk of itself.
