American Idiot

Green Day

(Warner Brothers)

Green Day’s new album is supposed to be some kind of rock opera about America’s post-9/11 terror paranoia, but really that’s completely irrelevant so it will not be mentioned again. The focus should stay far more centered on the poor songwriting and bloated lyrics on this record, and with the exception of the first single, nothing here is any fun. Green Day seems to be getting tired.

Billie Joe Armstrong’s self important new obsession with “politics” exposes him for the guy he wishes he had been on the last two GD records—an immature teenager trapped inside a thirty-something’s body. The anti-establishment imagery painted all over the album and its “backstory” aren’t very well reflected in the songs. Although this could have been a good development, they strangely vie to replace it with boring, disingenuous stories of teen angst and disenchantment. BJ seems to realize that he can no longer pull this off in the first person, but the tricky mechanism he employs instead is about as ridiculous as 50 Cent making a concept record about being a gangster.

I love Green Day, and you probably do too, but while the band’s last couple of efforts (Warning and Nimrod) contained enough amazing songs to justify their continued existence, “American Idiot” slams the nails into their coffin with a depressingly heavy hand.

—Leon Neyfakh

Kiss and Tell

Sahara Hotnights

(RCA)

Sahara Hotnights’ story seems plucked from some major label’s idea book: Four women, all younger than twenty-five, growing up together in the same Swedish neighborhood, eventually discovering the Buzzcocks and Ramones and deciding to take on today’s hipster boys at their own game of 80’s-inspired punk-pop. While the formula sounds more Spice Girls than Sleater-Kinney, the Hotnights still manage legitimacy. Since their teenage years the four have been making rock music on their own terms and have risen from European obscurity thanks to nonstop dedication and undeniable talent. They landed stateside in 2002 with their sophomore album, Jennie Bomb, sold to the American audience on their good looks and tight hooks, and they are now back with their third album, the peppy and enjoyable Kiss & Tell.

Kiss & Tell kicks off with the barnstorming “Who Do You Dance For,” and immediately it is clear that the band is setting their charts on New Wave and power-pop glory, snarling with a mid-distortion guitar riff and Maria Andersson’s sweet-but-tough vocals. Two minutes later, as the song fades out to overlapping cries “Every night, every night! Ev-er-y night!” their influences are clear: These Swedes are doing their best Go-Go’s, without looking back for a second.

The album pounds away with track after track of similar glee, mixing the melodies but keeping the attitude, never resorting to a schlocky ballad or any other break from the frantic pace. Lyrics tell of boys that come and go, but their lyrics of love and loss, pain and joy rarely come to the forefront: A deliberate move, apparently, on an album that relies instead on spiky hooks and sugary harmonies, Casio keyboards and above all, never-flagging energy.

Though every song shares this bouncy 80’s girl-group aesthetic, several tracks stand out in the mix. The kinetic intro to “Nerves,” the album’s hardest track, betrays any claim that the album is short on flat-out rock, though the vocals still have moments breaking into heavenly high squeal, and it’s a compromise deftly handled by the band. On “Stay / Stay Away” Andersson’s voice reaches levels of emotion seen nowhere else on the album. In a second she turns from desperately declaring “it breaks my heart when you tell me to go” to rocking out in frustration with her girls behind her: “I’d stand on every corner around you / I will always be right behind you.” It’s a rare moment on the album when the lyrical content—not great, but let’s be fair; it’s not their first language—mingles with the sound to mutual advantage. When the girls are singing together, it’s reminiscent of the sense of fun that was integral to the ideology of early MTV’s girly darlings, and we remember the verity of the Hotnights’ formation: these are four life-long girlfriends, and their unity and cohesion can’t be forgotten on any moment of the album.

A first listen might reveal Sahara Hotnights as nothing but a B-league Sleater-Kinney, but after a few spins it’s clear that this band makes no pretensions to the riot-grrl ideology usually accompanying any girl-group aspiring to produce punk-pop. In short, they are playing this music without any agenda but fun, and this veneer permeates every moment. This band doesn’t need videos of themselves waterskiing in formation or cavorting playfully around a fountain to prove themselves as true to their declared image: the music of Kiss & Tell speaks for itself

—Christopher A. Kukstis

Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned

The Prodigy

(Maverick)

What made the Prodigy’s 1997 release The Fat of the Land so potent and noteworthy was that it found its genesis in the late-90s British rave scene while giving a hefty nod to something more hardcore. With the heavily-pierced and demonic-looking Keith Flint posing as front man, the Prodigy had legions singing along to the inane and repetitive lyrics of the likes of “Firestarter,” “Breathe” and even the controversial “Smack My Bitch Up.”

Their newest album Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned begins strongly, seeming to pick up where The Fat of the Land left off. “Spitfire,” the album’s opening track, is a blood-pumping electronic anthem that plays like the aural equivalent of a shot of adrenaline to the heart. Much like Oasis’s “Fucking in the Bushes,” there’s simply no sitting still while listening to this song. Sadly, however, the remaining twelve tracks come nowhere near to living up to this high standard. The second track “Girls” sounds like an unholy marriage of the all of the worst elements of old-school rap and British drum and bass rave music.

This album’s major fault stems from the absence of the crazed Keith Flint. What had made the Prodigy so unique was its ambiguous and unique identity as an electronica band with an identifiable voice and front man; it wasn’t just rave music, but something new with a cool beat that you could sing along to. Evidently, however, the real brains behind the Prodigy from the start was arranger/producer Liam Howlett and, in this latest effort, he takes the band back to its roots, unfortunately relegating it to the category of mediocre dance music.

—Steven N. Jacobs

Straight Outta Ca$hville

Young Buck

(G-Unit/Interscope)

The title of Young Buck's first solo project, Straight Outta Ca$hville, is a throwback to 1989's Straight Outta Compton, the classic gang life manifesto from N.W.A. (Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, Easy-E, M.C. Ren and D.J. Yella). N.W.A.'s depictions of violence, often directed against the police, put Los Angeles on the hip hop map. Hailing from Nashville, Buck hopes to do for the Dirty South with Ca$hville what Compton did for the Wild West.

Buck, formerly a Cash Money Millionaire who—though still a millionaire—currently rolls with G-Unit, clearly takes a great deal of pride in his Southern roots. Most of the songs on Ca$hville are situated in his old Tennessee hustling grounds. In "Do It Like Me," Buck boasts: "I know I got a dirty mouth, bitch, I'm from the South / I'm nothin' like what you done seen or you done heard about." But from the gunshots that open the album to the gritty tales of life in the 'hood to the vicious threats against rival rappers like Ja Rule, everything sounds very familiar. Buck embraces the same themes and uses the same thundering beats featured in the solo albums of his G-Unit counterparts 50 Cent (Get Rich Or Die Tryin') and Lloyd Banks (The Hunger for More).

There are a few fresh tracks on Ca$hville including "Let Me In," a club hit with a catchy staccato melody, and "Look At Me Now," in which a reflective Buck raps about "what these streets done done to me" over a bouncy beat by Denaun Porter (who produced the steel pan anthem "P.I.M.P." for 50 Cent). Unlike Compton, however, Ca$hville fails to inspire any awe or fear of Southern street culture. It is Tennessee, after all.

—Andrew C. Esensten