Green Day – Warning
next up, we’re out of the 90s and into the aughts with Green Day’s last full original record before American Idiot, Warning:
Warning kicks off with it’s title track, a lighthearted, silly, catchy track. the rhythm hook on this track is infectious as hell. Blood, Sex and Booze is a really fun track too – the verses are deliciously sleazy, and the lyrics here are coy. fun track. Church On Sunday is nice and inoffensive. i feel v middling about this track. i get where Fashion Victim is coming from but i’m not a fan of the execution on this one, lyrically. Castaway is a WEIRD track, and i’m picking up what its putting down. this is nearly a ska track. i want Half Past Two to cover this song. Misery has some real new vibes for the band, and i think its a good fit here, tbh. def not my fave on the record but and interesting experiment and sounds a lot like a few different Mad Caddies songs i enjoy, haha. was originally mixed on Deadbeat Holiday but it def grew on me. sometimes its just vibes. man that harmonica on Hold On just comes right out the gate hard huh. Jackass feels mostly plain until that weird jazzy sax solo that vanishes as suddenly as it appears. weird. i feel like Waiting could’ve gotten a more stripped down version – as it stands its aight. for sure. not huge on Minority. like Fashion Victim, i think there’s a grain of something here, but the execution doesn’t do it for me. which is a shame because the jaunty vibes here are a lot of fun. reading some of the band’s comments on this and the final track, Macy’s Day Parade definitely puts this album in historical place, as it were. i’ll mention more below. this is a nice closer – i enjoy it but am not blown away by it.
faves – Warning, Blood, Sex and Booze, Castaway, Deadbeat Holiday
dislikes –
so yeah this was an interesting record. sonicly, it’s following in the path Nimrod carved out, which is great! i think they could venture a little further from the sounds they’re known for, as there’s a couple tracks here that i wish they’d pushed just a liiiittle bit more, but on the whole the record’s extremely pleasant to listen to. Armstrong’s vocals hold extremely strong here, and there’s some great hooks in this group.
thematically and lyrically, like i said i feel like it’s notable when this record came out. nearly the entirety of Green Day’s real breakout success has been during the Clinton presidency, and this record was released like a month before the 2000 election. Armstrong mentioned in an interview about Minority noticing the conservative momentum building, and there’s tracks in here that deal with that and build towards what i know is coming in a few releases. the rest of the record plays in much the same space a lot of Green Day has – fucking around in your 20s and a variety of relationships. this feels like a sunset for the fuck around era, is what im saying, and it colors the record in an interesting light. i’m very interested to see what the next record, Shenanigans, brings.
overall though, a nice listen. this aint gonna be my favorite record but i appreciate the space to grow and try new things, and there’s some real good tracks off this one.
Warning – 6/10
next time we’ll be checking out their 2002 b-sides record, Shenanigans.
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