GREEN DAY レコード& CD

Review: It's 1997 and Green Day have just unveiled Nimrod, their fifth studio album, with the clear intention of trying different ideas, en masse. Rather than specifically looking to release an album per se, the band convinced Reprise Records to let them loose on what's effectively a series of singles. Lacking the coherency of a full record, the fact it still bagged universally positive reviews - with many rightly pointing to its rousing and invigorating qualities (surely a product of its shape-shifting nature) - is testament to the band's deft abilities.

It certainly showed off the outfit's ability to craft these huge, memorable hook lines and melodies, the sort of tracks that you instantly feel you know, even on first listen. Veering between folk, punk, ska and skate rock, what's here may not have had quite the same impact as Dookie, but many ways this is a more convincing argument for their legendary status.

Review: If Dookie was packed full of raging adolescence, last summer highs and formative experiences, Insomniac, Green Day's follow up record, marked the band moving into a new life stage, sonically and lyrically. Exploring their most punk-punk sound yet, a heavier, growlier, blood, sweat and tears-ier take on the immediately arresting, riff-focused formula that first grabbed our attention.

So it stands to reason a quarter century later things still sound powerful and pleasurable. Of course the singles 'Geek Stink Breath', 'Stuck With Me', 'Brain Stew/Jaded' and 'Walking Construction' will be more than familiar even to those who have only heard the band in passing. But the record is packed full of depth and quality elsewhere it arguably far exceeds its older, more widely remembered sibling.