Green Day uno! review

               In the wake of Green Day front man Billie Joe Armstrong’s real-life 21st Century breakdown, how is the band’s new album “¡Uno!” faring with critics and fans?
Last week,Armstrong launched into a profanity-laced tirade at the iHeartRadio Music Festival in Las Vegas and Green Day later announced that their lead singer would be “seeking treatment for substance abuse” and that the band would postpone some promotional appearances.
“¡Uno!,” the first in an ambitious trilogy of albums that Green Day plans to release in quick succession, may suffer without the band in action to push it. It’s currently No. 8 on the iTunes bestselling albums chart, behind releases from Mumford & Sons, No Doubt and Pink.
Green Day had been on a commercial and creative roll. The group’s 2004 concept album “American Idiot” was a smash with fans, and the stage musical it spawned earned raves on Broadway. But the band, as it has throughout its existence, has been taking heat for not being punk rock enough–Armstrong had recently announced that he’d be joining “The Voice” as a mentor on pop diva’s Christina Aguilera’s team.
It’s tough to come up with one good album, let alone three. The Clash pulled off a triple play successfully with its 1980 triple album “Sandinista!” and the Smashing Pumpkins scored a winner with “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness,” released as a two-CD or three-LP set in 1995. But even good groups typically only have about 10 good songs during any creative cycle. Can Green Day pull off a punk rock hat trick?

A survey of what the critics are saying about “¡Uno!”:
–”If by definition punk is (or was, or should be) about breaking rules, “¡Uno!” breaks about as many as the new Carly Rae Jepsen album — or appearing on a Vegas bill alongside acts such as Taylor Swift, Linkin Park, Usher, Swedish House Mafia and other hit makers to do a quick-turnaround set at the behest of Clear Channel. Every chorus is telegraphed, every bridge comes when it should, and every chord feels crafted by the streamlining experts at Ikea,” Los Angeles Times.
–”Where their heroes the Clash channeled a surge of creativity into 1980′s eclectic, sprawling triple album Sandinista!, Green Day’s new trilogy of single albums – ¡Uno!, ¡Dos! and ¡Tré! – will arrive at two-month intervals…The pace doesn’t vary and the recent social commentary has given way to more teenage concerns, but references to “running out of time” and being “too young to die” suggest a growing obsession with mortality. Thus, pushing 40, the spiky threesome have made a very decent fist of sounding like their twenty something selves,” The Guardian.
“Uno!” may be wall-to-wall fast, hard and loud, but much of it also feels forced, conforming and dutiful. It’s punk comfort food, the ultimate contradiction in terms. Billie Joe Armstrong — who checked into rehab over the weekend after an onstage meltdown — doesn’t show the vocal nuance here that he has managed on past efforts. He enters the verses, and soars through the choruses, in arcs predictable enough to numb. Where he used to find a way to shade even the most blunt phrasings, here he seems stuck in a single sneer,” The Daily News.