Courtesy of www.spin.com
19 December 2012
By Desmond Ho, Staff Writer
Green Day’s experimental album trilogy finally comes to a conclusion with ¡Tre!. Despite ¡Uno! merely being passable, ¡Dos! was so good that I had high hopes for the third installment. Unfortunately, while it’s better than ¡Uno!, it doesn’t reach the heights ¡Dos! does.
The band claimed that this album would merge the power-pop style of ¡Uno! with the garage rock of ¡Dos! and, for the most part, that’s exactly what the album does. The best example of this sound is “Drama Queen,” a track with ‘60s-esque verses bridged by pure pop-punk. Other songs, such as the opener “Brutal Love,” balance the two sounds out well, but “Drama Queen” is probably the album’s highlight. Much of the album falls back on power-pop, but none of it is really bad, per se. It just doesn’t feel as fresh as the previous album did.
One of my biggest gripes with ¡Uno! is that many of the songs sounded like leftovers that the band didn’t want to cut. It’s a similar case here, as the songs don’t really fit on either of the preceding albums. Between the three albums, only maybe half of the songs feel absolutely necessary; songs like “Missing You” and “Amanda” are practically filler, if still competent tracks. However, there’s still some experimentation, such as the album’s closing piano ballad “The Forgotten.”
¡Tre! is another decent record in the band’s 25-year (and still ongoing) career. It wasn’t as good as ¡Dos! and certainly won’t rank among their best, but it’s still a solid album.
6/10