On ‘Father of All…,’ Green Day Embraces the Future by Looking to the Past
by Isaiah Anthony
What is the correct response when someone has so clearly peaked, be it in commercial appeal, cultural relevance, artistic ability or anything else that elicits societal acclaim? Should they resist their descent, try to backtrack to what worked before in hopes of delaying the inevitable erosion of quality in favor of tried-and-true conformity? This is all too commonly the trap that artists of former guards fall into, manifesting an echo chamber of a fan-base consisting only of those trapped in a similar state of arrested development.
The correct course of action is not to resist the descent from the peak but to look for the next mountain. After a decade of stumbles and missteps, the genre-carving, decade-defining triumvirate Green Day is seeking that next modest mountain.
On the San Francisco pop-punk icons thirteenth studio album, Father of All…, previous norms are delightfully abandoned in favor of a more traditional take on rock, resulting in a crisp, 26-minute project that lacks in general stylistic originality but oozes a quality not seen from Green Day this millennium - fun.
That’s not to say this is the first quality Green Day album of the 21st century. The viscerally political concept album American Idiot (2004) is a fierce contender for the group’s magnum opus, but the immense commercial and critical success of American Idiot undoubtedly shifted the career trajectory of the band into a highly political sphere. No successive projects came close to matching the punch of American Idiot, instead playing like soulless attempts to recapture lost magic, with Green Day’s last project, Revolution Radio (2016), serving as the apex of depthless political provocation.
Perhaps the Green Day boys grew tired of politics. Perhaps frontman Billie Joe Armstrong finally got over the Bush administration and subsequently has not read the news for the past few years. Whatever the reason, to its great benefit, Father of All… is an apolitical album, instead opting for more simplistic themes of love, hate, anger, and youth, all of which play more naturally than previously seen forced preaching.
On Father of All…, Green Day makes the long-overdue transition from mall-punk to dad-rock, invoking a wide range of rock avenues, dipping into soul, classic, beach rock, and more, acting as auditory chameleons, adopting a sound then dropping it before it has a chance to grow stale. While this would be detrimental to a less-tenured band seeking to establish a sound, it’s not a bad way to usher in the twilight of a group’s career.
Tracks like lead single Father of All… allude to Black Keys-age soul-rock, while others like Stab You in the Heart evoke notions of Billy Haley, 50s rock & roll. It’s jumbled, directionless, incohesive, and the most one can ask for from Green Day.
There is liberation in apathy. In the year 2020, not much is to be expected from Green Day, and the resulting product is all the better because of that fact. Father of All… is a fine, hors d'oeuvre of an album, with a little of everything and not too much of anything.