iTre!

Green Day music flood

Having released three records in a short period of time, Green Day gave their listeners a tough task to do, because these are not best-of or remix collections, but actual albums with new studio material. We barely familiarized ourselves with the second part, !Dos!, when the Green Day workshop delivered a third one, !Tre! Some would say that is too much, that instead of recording all forty songs on three CDs, the ensemble should have run them through a strict selection and released one perfect long player. Yet, keeping in mind the success and quality of !Uno! и !Dos!, we keep the faith that the ending to this story will be just as fine. Green Day, should it be reminded, have abstained from deep concepts and political messages in favor of playing punk rock in as many shapes as there can be. These lads have been wandering freely across time collecting and interpreting best samples of the genre while preserving the uniqueness of their own sound and music taste. Essentially, !Tre! is an efficient continuation to the first two efforts.

!Tre! does not bet on speed and vibe

Once again, the third CD of the trilogy is a continuation, not a repetition of what was played on the first two. So, if you compare the first with the third, you will spot particular differences, especially the tendency to lower tempos and stronger lyrical themes. Those tracks on the !Tre! set that could be classified as truly fast and raging, the kind Green Day have always been good at, are the short and aggressive 99 Revolutions, and the enormous Dirty Little Bastards, uniting several segments. Sex, Drugs And Violence, despite its menacing title, also has a high speed, but there is just as much pop music here as punk. Still, the lyrical and musical foundation of !Tre! is formed by reserved and thoughtful, at times even heartbreaking, songs. The best of them open and close the record. Brutal Love is an experiment with country whose mood and unhurriedness prepare listeners for surprises. The biggest one is the concluding song, a brilliant called The Forgotten with piano as centerpiece. It could be easily selected soundtrack for melodrama s with saddest endings.

Trump up the sleeve

There can be a lot of hardcore Green Day fans who would take !Tre! as nothing more than just a collection of what failed to make it to the previous works. Those records were more dynamic, energetic, and, generally speaking, sounded more like Green Day. Here, among ballads and mid tempo songs many of which, like Missing You, or X-Kid deal with uneasy issues of losing something or someone dear, it seems quite difficult to recognize the old Green Day. As odd as it is, !Tre! indeed gathers leftovers, but, despite the logic and reason, this is the one album that seems to be the most normal and expected variant for Green Day to develop, considering the fact that these men are no longer seventeen years old. One day, and probably it has already come, this ensemble that seemed to be never tired of praising careless youth and easy life, had to make some amends to song-writing principles. The first that begged to be done was simply determined by their natural aging. So, !Tre!, although only rarely reminding of Green Day in their best shape, looks like the most interesting and even promising work of the musicians who apparently have lost neither creative powers nor ambitions.