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Green Day’s Sociopolitical Sarcasm Ages Well in Sharp ‘Saviors’: Album Review
Green Day's 'Saviors' is a handsome bookend to 2004's 'American Idiot,' and the band's attack feels even sharper, in some regards, 20 years later.
Credit Rob Cavallo — the producer behind “American Idiot” and Green Day’s commercial breakthrough of 1994, “Dookie” — with aiding Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt and Tré Cool in unsheathing their knives and sharpeing their new music with such complex harmony alongside the old-school punk. While the ”fairy dust and ballyhoo” promises of “Strange Days Are Here to Stay” is reminiscent of Generation X-era Billy Idol, the insistent testing of a family’s wills is given spoonful-of-sugar melodicism with its acoustic start point and its lingering sawed strings. Pepper”-esque dénouement, Green Day has time for one more sad, socially scabrous, fresh finale in “Fancy Sauce.” As the slow parade of crackling snare drums and strangled guitars rocks pensively to its close, Armstrong – in probably his most passionate vocal – bleats on about “Scratching at the wallpaper, in my solitude,” cartoon newscasts and ever-present victimhood before turning Kurt Cobain’s most cherished phrase on its head — updated as “Everybody’s famous, stupid and contagious” — before ending with a sardonic “We all die young someday.”
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