american idiot
Greenday
Virgin; Rs 135

Jesus of Suburbia epic, wham-bam, wheeze on your knees, screech, puff-puff, snort-snort, twang-twang, bang-bang, hypertension, aliens crawling across the nation, girlfriend gone nuts, dreams going broke, rock--roll house, rock-- roll car, one dope dealer who really gets to be the star; one American idiot who ceremoniously dies and more American idiots who are unceremoniously born.

Greenday are pissed as hell; with life in America post 9/11 getting unbearable and it calls for a rock opera as this to spit it all out (yet another way to keep the nation all fired up and a good one at that). This one’s a non-stop rollercoaster ride through harmonies that are pumped up with periodic spurts of focused aggression, at times getting deflated and settling down over utterly melodic interludes before getting revved up all over again.

Boulevard of broken dreams is probably a track even the Calcutta street urchins are familiar with, courtesy FM enabled taxis blaring out the goodies loud and clear nowadays ' but friends, the hyped up and heavily air-played track is probably as average a song can get, that too on a classic like this one. Hard to single out tracks and make the rest look like added freebies, for that just isn’t the case on American Idiot. Each track scores its own set of points and we’re talking really high numbers. If you still want a Top-5 on this one, here’s a random sheet ' Suburbia, Holiday, Give me Novocaine, Extraordinary Girl, Wake me up when September ends. Even though the genre connects to a post-Nirvana kind of a punkish offshoot, it wouldn’t be entirely wrong to mention that a distinct 80s hair metal influence haunts like a pleasant ghost. But it’s the undying spirit of rock that really takes the album to another realm ' call it the boulevard of rock and roll dreams.

Sunny Dua