American Idiot Review

A punk band with nothing left to prove writes a rock opera about a bored suburban kid, and the gamble works because the songs are enormous. Rob Cavallo's production is the strongest argument on the card: every guitar is scaled for an arena, the harmonies are stacked like power pop, and the two nine minute suites, Jesus of Suburbia and Homecoming, are edited so cleanly that they never feel like exercises in ambition.

Reviewers were surprised and mostly generous, and the record rescued a band that had been drifting since the nineties. The writing is where the consensus breaks, and it breaks hard enough to pull the lyrics grade two tiers below the sound. The anger is sincere but the vocabulary is thin, the characters are types rather than people, and an album reaching for a statement about the country settles for slogans where it needed detail.

It plays better as a run of singles than as a story. Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Holiday and the title track are built to last, while much of the connective tissue exists to justify the concept around them. Hugely effective, genuinely ambitious, and shallower than it believes itself to be.