Green Day – Father of All… Review

On first listen, Father of All… was not so bad. Maybe it was the brain rot brought on by a pandemic or perhaps the desire to connect with something that year, but Green Day did not sound too off the ball. Give it four years to gestate. Return to Father of All…, it is as bad as people said it was. But it’s bad in the context of the established Green Day sound. Father of All… is not the noise people know and love, the band takes risk after risk here and, while few of them land, none are complete disasters. From the half-decent title track to the tepid highs of Meet Me on the Roof, there is plenty to like about Father of All… just not much to love. It is a very straight-shooting album and most of the thrills come from instrumental momentum. Thankfully, there is plenty of that within. 

Short, snappy pieces of work guide Green Day through some of their best bits here. Fire, Ready, Aim and Oh Yeah! are decent efforts on first listen but the issue many have with these songs is clear from the first note. They feel like pop riffs, removed from the Dookie aesthetic or boundary-pushing popularity of American Idiot. Billie Joe Armstrong has always been a placid political commentator at best. His lyrical shortcomings are made up for with instrumental bliss, from harsh sound and energetic displays of guitar work. Shout it loud enough and the message will carry itself. This is the great issue Father of All… has. Instrumentally plodding and vacant lyrics appear out of the blue, Armstrong and the gang rolling the barrel of misery, scraping it off the floor until there is nothing left. It still lingers a little odd that Armstrong is singing of crawling around on a dancefloor, as he does on Meet Me on the Roof, but these lighter riffs are a chance to explore a new sound.  

End the expedition here, then. What replaces the glory days sound is not a winning recipe. Plodding guitar riffs which sound a bit more like The Hoosiers are producing their work than anything else. Lyrical assessments of the world around them boil down to escaping into brighter spots. In finding safety in their echo chamber, Green Day loses what edge they had left from their formative years. At least they are searching for something new, a note or instrument to reflect this change. Song after song sounds like a crossroads experience where the band are trying not to freak out their listeners but also searching for an assessment and revolution of their prior songs. Most of these songs sound quite lax. Not phoned-in, though. There is still passion heard throughout but it is misplaced to the point of futility.  

Their heart is still beating loud but in their clawing attempts at recapturing nostalgia on I Was a Teenage Teenager, the band is trying to relocate their passions. Pack up your heart-shaped grenades and skateboard, your fingerless gloves and the promises of the previous generation. Green Day makes a genuine effort to evolve itself into a new genre, to test the waters of what would eventually be abandoned for the sake of familiarity. A shame it was received so coldly, but it is easier to be revolted by dog sick on the carpet than it is to sift through it looking for your ring. You can stomp through the muddy trenches of Father of All… as much as you like, few will come out the other end clutching an experience worth the effort of their garage rock revival, sometimes soft-swinging, Stab You in the Heart-like noise.