Arriving earlier than expected but last as planned,
Green Day's third album of 2012 concludes their pop-punk trilogy not on a triumphant note but on one of confusion.
Green Day's blueprints for 2012 and beyond may have been trashed by
Billie Joe Armstrong's unexpected entry into rehab but that doesn't alter the albums themselves, which aren't necessarily a carefully constructed trilogy but rather an outpouring of energy, the group pushing out every completed song it had. ¡Tré!'s two predecessors had clear identities:
¡Uno! was the arena rock record;
¡Dos! was the punk-garage lark. In contrast, ¡Tré! feels like leftovers, the songs that didn't fit either theme, a collection of songs capturing the band at its loosest and poppiest, throwing away tunes without much care. It's hookier and not as ponderous as
¡Uno! but not quite as breakneck as
¡Dos!, never delving into the sleaze of "Fuck Time," never feeling like a last grasp at adolescence the way
¡Dos! did at its best. Instead, ¡Tré! is a morning-after record, sometimes regretful, sometimes unrepentant, divided between unapologetic partying and amends for their wayward ways. On the whole, ¡Tré! winds up on the happier side of the scale: the rhythms are insistent, the hooks immediate, the veneer bright and cheerful, never once regretting the chaos that happened the night before. But underneath this good time is the slight, perhaps unconscious, admission that things cannot continue as they did before. There is not the desperation or the hedonistic pulse that ran through
¡Dos!, but rather a shrugging admission that the time for partying is over. So there's a bittersweet undertow to ¡Tré!, a feeling underscored by
Armstrong's rehab: he could no longer continue trying to recapture his youth, but dammit if he doesn't come close to doing so at times throughout ¡Tré! ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine