I'm beginning to recall why artists will record 30 to 40 songs and whittle down to 12.3 Out Of 5 Stars
"Tre!" wraps up the three album rocket ride in Green Day's ambitious experiment. Ambition doesn't always yield greatness, and while Uno! felt like a great start, Dos! and Tre! were let downs. "Tre!" in particular starts off with a batch of soggy songs that just don't have any kick to them. You really don't get to the good stuff until "X-Kid" starts blowing down some doors. Then you get a teenage anthem in "Sex, Drugs & Violence" (which chooses to rhyme with "English Math and Science"). The best thing here is the segmented "Dirty Rotten Bastards," which has a feel more like "American Idiot" than the other albums in the trilogy plus has the added feature of some really nifty bass runs from Mike Dirnt. Finally, there's a Beatlesque string drenched power ballad, "The Forgotten." Which isn't bad, but not amazing.
There's a key line in "X-Kid" that's sort of telling.
"You're not so young,
but you're still dumb.
You're an X-Kid
and you never even got started again."
Is this how the band feels about itself? After two of the more successful albums of the past decade, "Uno," "Dos" and "Tre" feel a lot like the band treading through past glory (and maybe they're waiting for Billy Joe to get out of rehab so they can take these songs out and road rock them), but it feels like the Sandinista Clash. Three albums of sprawl that could have made one condensed kicking single disc, maybe even a double. What they stand as now is a case of overkill.
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