Green Day (3.5 stars)
American Idiot
It sounds like a terrible idea: Punk-pop band Green Day, heretofore known for simple but catchy 3-minute, three-chord songs and albums with titles like Dookie and Nimrod, decides to record an intricate rock opera about the state of America, complete with two 9-minute, five-part opuses and main characters named Jesus of Suburbia and St. Jimmy.
But American Idiot, Green Day's seventh album, is not at all terrible. It's a well-constructed work that takes the band's previous strengths and combines them with a strong storytelling sense and a flair for the theatrical. It's not even surprising that Green Day has gotten to this point: Their last album, 2000's woefully underrated Warning, was a near-concept album itself, meditating on the sacrifices and changes of adulthood. American Idiot is more unified, and its lyrics tell a clear story with characters and plot, but it's not that big a step to make.
American Idiot also manages not to mangle its political messages, only going for the obvious in the title track. The band doesn't come off as ill-informed or flippant; if anything, the album is a little too serious, and could use some of the levity of Warning's wry comments on growing up. Some of the songs also sound incomplete, as if they were written merely as transitional parts of the story and not as fully-formed ideas to stand on their own.
Still, given the possibilities for disaster, American Idiot is a real achievement for Green Day, and proof that they've got far more going for them than songs about masturbation.
Colonel Claypool's Bucket of Bernie Brains (3 stars)
Eyeball in the Sky
Colonel Claypool's Bucket of Bernie Brains is a supergroup of sorts whose odd moniker pays tribute to its members: Les Claypool and Brain (Primus), Buckethead (G'n'R) and Bernie Worrell (Funkadelic).
All musicians' musicians, Eyeball in the Sky is predictably all stellar playing and breathtaking virtuosity. But despite all the talent in the room, the dominating personality, for better and worse, is Les Claypool.
Claypool is deeply creative, a fantastic judge of talent, and a staggering bass player who manages to keep his tone as interesting as his rhythm. But Claypool has among the most annoying voices you'll ever hear, and one of the most annoyingly smug sensibilities you'll ever experience: imagine Rush's Geddy Lee sucking on helium and then beginning to recite poetry. Perhaps the vocals would grate less if they had more to offer instead of contrived quirkiness and ridiculous self-mythologizing, as on opener "Buckethead," with its portrait of Buckethead: "Standing up like brave Ulysses with guitar is his hand." Of course, the Greek hero never thought to wear a KFC chicken bucket as a helmet.
Not surprisingly, the best moments here are the instrumentals, especially the nearly 10-minute "Elephant Ghost," where Worrell's keyboard creates a space groove for the others to display their chops around. Little else here merits attention if you are not already a member of the cult audience of technical fetishists and jam-band fans who have loyally stuck by Claypool since his days in Primus.
Tom Waits (4 stars)
Real Gone
After a decade making respectable singer-songwriter discs, in 1983, Tom Waits twisted himself into a Weimer Dylan and released Swordfishtrombones, which featured his blown-out voice, dark and edgy and metallic jazz inflections, and a cast of decadent losers to populate the songs.
With only a few missteps along the way (The Black Rider in 1993), things have gotten even more interesting since then, as Waits has managed to continue to push his eccentricities while constantly testing his restless creativity and talent.
This time out, Real Gone removes the keyboard playing that on past efforts walked the melody to hold Waits' more unwieldy songs together. The missing keyboard makes this a far harder-sounding disc than any of Waits' earlier albums. You will never believe that this man once recorded a soundtrack with Crystal Gale. In many ways, the sounds on Real Gone are a perfect match for Waits increasingly cynical and dark sensibility. "Sins Of The Fathers" is 10 minutes of hillbilly horror, followed by the cage-rattling urban decay of "Shake." But it also means that Real Gone is the most challenging disc Waits has yet offered, and if you are not already a fan, this is probably a terrible place to start.
That said, Real Gone is well worth the effort it takes to adjust to Waits' odd sounds and shattered vocals as he works each song like it his only way to understand this broken world.
Various artists (2.5 stars)
Trekkies 2
The companion album to the Trekkies 2 movie, itself a sequel to the cult hit Trekkies, is a collection of Star Trek-inspired bands. Needless to say, this is an offering with limited appeal, and yet, even with that restriction, it's not all that bad.
Not surprisingly, the bands featured on the disc aren't producing mellow top 40 sounds. The majority fall firmly in the pop-punk category, with the exception being Stovokor, a death-metal group of Klingon warriors who contribute two tracks to the disc's total of 35.
Stovokor, from Portland, have an angry sound and their lyrics are some of the most in-character of all the bands, with lines like, "The end of humans / Forced extinction / Forsee the end / Growing close." Disappointingly however, the words are sung in English, not Klingon—though with death-metal it's nearly impossible to tell the difference.
For some odd reason, the rest of the bands hail from the Sacramento area. They include Warp 11, No Kill I, No Kill I: Deep Space Nine and No Kill I: The Next Generation. For these groups, their love of Gene Roddenberry's franchise is tempered with a self-mocking humor that helps the tunes go down better. Also in the mix are a couple of tracks by Ash Productions and Leslie Fish "and friends," both of which are known as "filk" groups—Star Trek-themed groups performing in the folk-music tradition. (The name filk is the result of a typo somewhere in history.)
The songs deal with such serious Trek issues as running out of alcohol in deep space; a paean to everybody's favorite captain, James T. Kirk; a critique of different characters and ships; and even a heartfelt questioning from the Expendable Guy—the one in the red shirt who always got snuffed within the first few moments of the classic series.
The bands show varying degrees of musicianship but it's all clearly done with tongues in cheeks so it's hard to fault such enthusiastic performances. But the album pales by far when compared to seeing the groups perform live and in costume. After all, it's one thing to listen to someone sing about green-skinned slave girls and quite another to see them doing it while wearing Star Fleet uniforms.