It was October 10 1995, and fresh off of the success of 'Dookie' only a year and a half previously, Green Day were already about to release the follow-up album, 'Insomniac'. It's a strange album when looking back at it in the context of Green Day's discography because it progresses some of Green Day's elements while regressing on others, but overall is a decent if not amazing follow up to the legendary 'Dookie'.
Opening track 'Armatage Shanks' quickly demonstrates the biggest problem with with the album as a whole - It sounds like 'Dookie' in every single aspect. The songs still consists of mainly of 3 or 4 distorted power chords repeated over Mike Dirnt's thundering bass and Tre Cool's rapid drumming, as Billie Joe Armstrong sings lyrics about how much of a loser the narrator is. This is very much the same on following track 'Brat' as well as 'No Pride', 'Stuart and The Ave' (which has a nice hook at least.), 'Jaded', 'Westbound Sign' and finally, 'Tight Wad Hill'. Individually these songs are decent enough but hearing them all together is too much, and has given me a headache several times due to the sheer force of every song, sometimes with no break in between.
A problem the album lacked commercially is the lack of clear singles. Of course you don't need to have an obvious pop song on your album for it to be good - just look at 'Kid A' by Radiohead or 'To be Kind' by Swans - but if you're listening to Green Day you want to ideally be singing along for a large portion of the album, hence why their catchiest albums 'Dookie' and 'American Idiot' are their most popular. The first song to hint at this is 'Stuck With Me', which has a decent chorus and was the second single after the track which follows it on the album, 'Geek Stink Breath'. Personally, it's hard to understand why this was chosen as the lead single for the album, as although the chorus is very obviously a chorus, the melody sounds a bit rubbish and is the only song on 'Insomniac' I would call annoyingly repetitive.
Anyway, enough negativity! 'Bab's Uvula Who?' is a great, catchy song that also has a cool trick of ending nearly every line with "I get myself all wound up" without it getting annoying. This is followed by my favourite of the Green-Day-formula songs that clog up so much of the album, '86' with it's bitter lyrics targeting the clubs that banned them and the fans that shunned them after their major label signing. 'Panic Song' has got an amazing bass-led intro that does unfortunately devolve into power-chord madness; at least it works a bit in the framing of the song, as it's about having a panic attack.
The best song on the album, and the one which has rightfully survived longest is 'Brain Stew'. It starts off with a sparse but powerful power chord sequence which comes as a shock after 20 minutes of very loud, dense layers of music. Even better are the lyrics, which are full of some of the strongest imagery in any Green Day song ("My feels like they're gonna bleed... Dried up and bulging out my skull"), and are appropriately delivered by a desperately tired sounding Armstrong. All in all it's the perfect soundtrack to those nights where you maddeningly can't sleep even when you feel too tired to actually do anything.
The final track is 'Walking Contradiction', which is the only song on the album to feel like a development of the big hit singles from 'Dookie', with a laser sharp focus on hypocrites and the best hook of the album. All in all, 'Insomniac' is a decent album, but it certainly feels like a step back from 'Dookie'. It retains many of the aspects of the admittedly great deep cuts from the 94' classic without making much progression or transferring many of the qualities that made songs like 'When I Come Around' and 'Basket Case' so potent. Nonetheless, it does a good job as the infamous album-after-mainstream-success, and while it probably didn't create many new Green Day fans it wouldn't have disappointed those who were already there.
7/10
No comments:
Post a Comment