Father Of All - Green Day: Review
is a legendary California pop punk band who released some of the most essential mainstream punk music of the 90's. They spent the 2000's dropping thematic and politically charged records that made them even more popular, but since then they have had difficulty getting their footing. After the critically panned 2012 trio of albums Uno!, Dos! and Tre! the band collected some good karma with fans on the follow-up Revolution Radio in 2016 being a more true to form pop punk album, but critics still weren't convinced. Father Of All features short songs with edgy themes in the song topics and promotional material and looks to be the most true to form punk the band has been in decades.
Review By Lavender:
It's been a very long time since I have truly loved a Green Day record, like I'm talking American Idiot. While 21st Century Breakdown and Revolution Radio certainly have their moments I have long missed the youthful edge the band had in the 90's and the political grit they put on display on American Idiot. I was hoping that we would get a return to one or both of these on the record but in its place is half-hearted and meaningless politics paired with Green Day sounding more out of touch than ever before.
There isn't a whole ton of good on this record but we can address the songs I don't hate first. Meet Me On The Roof is a pretty average pop rock tune where the band thankfully aren't trying to ham-fistedly "rock hard" and just let it be a decent jangly tune. Stab You In The Heart may be the records most tolerable tune as a jangly surf punk track with catchy refrains and an energy that isn't as painful as the rest of what is here. The lyrics can actually be pretty funny at times which is very VERY refreshing. Junkies On A High isn't bad either the pacing is much better as the band doesn't try to force themselves to cosplay as punk rock and the track is ultimately better for it.
Other songs here like Sugar Youth and Graffitia are generic and a little bit boring but there isn't really anything to actively complain about, they just aren't doing much that is interesting. The single Father Of All is a simple and straightforward rock song that doesn't have much to it, but what little it does have is taken away by the absolutely awful vocal effects that give the song no chance to conjure any excitement at all. Fire, Ready, Aim is almost the exact same problem though it does have some catchy vocal harmonies the songwriting is incredibly shallow and the sound of the mix and the instruments is really cheap which is just bad for a band of this caliber.
The worst points on the record are when Green Day shows off their incredibly vapid attitude vocally and prove how out of touch they are with rock music instrumentally. Oh Yeah! is the most boomer thing I've heard all year and it sounds like Green Day is trying to make a song that classic rock fans will fall in love with, but instead of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, they're trying to channel th worst corniest AC/DC and Motley Crue tracks. I Was A Teenage Teenager on the other hand tries so hard to appeal to youth that it makes me wonder if anybody is capable of unironically relating to the bands disgustingly simple sentiment. The track reads of two decades of pop punk fed into a computer for it to spit out a mainline of the most derivative meaningless pap it possibly could. Finally Take The Money And Crawl comes straight out of The Black Keys playbook but it sounds awful and clearly the blues influence they are trying to work into this track is coming from such an out of touch place that it makes the song actively nauseating to listen to.
Father Of All is just as out of touch as the bands trilogy of 2012 records, but what makes it even more nauseating is the bands insistence that they're not. Green Day is writing and playing songs that give like their sound is whats popular right now and they can coast on their mastery while still making good music. But what actually comes out of this record is some veteran songwriters putting together a set of lazily written badly performed tracks that are nowhere near contemporary but act like they are. The attitude of the record is incredibly hard to sit through and the only silver lining is that there are a handful of songs on here that don't take themselves seriously enough to fit in. 2.5/10
