Green Day - Saviors (January 19th, 2024) • Page 71

I love Billies vocal inflection in the bridge of strange days, it sounds very insomniac/nimrod

 

Don’t care about the negative reviews. This album rules and I couldn’t be happier with it. Is it on the same level as American Idiot? No, but it’s a damn good record.

 

Yeah, I agree with a lot of the points made in the review, and yet I actually enjoy a decent portion of this album.

It’s not flawless, or up to their Dookie - AI run, but it’s easily the most I’ve enjoyed anything they have done in two decades. That’s enough for me.

 

Pitchfork gave father of all.. a 6.7 and this a 5.1. Hilarious.

 

I am more of a FOAM defender than most (still don't like it, but the title track is great), and that is flat out ridiculous.

 

A 6.7 would be like a pinnacle of the genre for Pitchfork with that score. It's ludicrous lol

 

Yeah and this is about as much as you can hope for considering they've been playing together for 35 years. Like if fucking Bruce Springsteen releases a new album no one is going to say "yeah this is so much better than Born To Run", they're gonna say "yeah, this is a Bruce Springsteen album"

Green Day is never going to write music like the did when they were 22, and it's never going to feel the way it did when I was 12. But Saviors is about is good as it gets in terms of a legacy punk band releasing material in their 50s.

 

Don't worry, pitchfork will likely close sooner than later and the scores will matter even less than they do now

 

It's pretty obvious to me that the Needledrop, IndieCast, and other outlets are mostly just talking about this record because there's some hype and buzz around it. They know it'll get clicks, get people talking, etc.

And I always find the reviews from folks like that to be pretty surface level and ill-informed because they don't have the reference points to talk about it effectively. Or, rather, it's not an important enough artist or release for them to bother digging deep on. It's easier to dunk on it because it's not their thing.

(Rather than putting the time in and looking at it objectively. Real talk: It's one of the reasons why I really value the way this site handles reviews.)

 

Bad reviews didn't stop me when Green Day was making bad music, they won't stop me now

 

Ian Cohen admitting he’d never listened to American Idiot was a truly wild moment of that Indiecast episode.

 

I can't believe how bad that podcast sounds for such a seemingly large following

 

I was going to delve deeper into the specifics of that "review" but figured nobody else had listened. Hah. There were a lot of weird moments in that discussion. Most of which had me wondering why they even bothered to discuss it in the first place... I really wish Ian had listened to it to counter whatever the hell Stephen was hearing.

I've actually had an email about half-written for their mailbag asking them about the "Green Day erasure" that comes up whenever 90s music gets discussed. They almost never come up in that context despite having outsold and had a longer-reaching impact on music than most of the other bands from that era.

...But now I know. Don't bother pressing send. They'll just say it's because they're derivative and unoriginal despite not having listened to anything by them since 1994.

 

I listened to that on a flight Friday while I was half asleep, but I swear at one point Ian said something to the effect of that you "cant overlook how influential and important they are to bands in the punk and emo adjacent scene" or whatever.

 

I didn't really expect either of them to like Green Day, to be honest. Hyden hates pop-punk, and Cohen's tastes for anything from our scene skew more toward second wave emo or emo revival records, not toward the poppier stuff that took root in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Bands like Green Day don't fit into either side of their venn diagram.

They did pay lip service to the band's influence, and Hyden half-heartedly said he enjoyed Dookie, but it sounded like neither one of them had really engaged with the band since the turn of the century.

 

Good Riddance

 

Another turning point a (pitch)fork stuck in the road

 

Baby, it’s fork time!

 

When reading pitchfork’s lost its fun

 

No rest for Pitchfork in my mind
On my own, here we go

 

Pitchfork going through the tumult it's going through right now is not a good thing. Let's not joke about it. A lot of people lost their jobs, and a lot of under-the-radar artists won't get exposure because of it. I think this particular review was lazy, and I think there's even a conversation to be had about some of the negative impacts that Pitchfork has had over the years, both on artists they've panned and on how they’ve shaped the perception of certain types of music (Pitchfork certainly did no favors to this scene for many, many years). Still, not going to cheer the downfall of what seemed like one of the last remaining durable institutions in music journalism.

 

He did say that. But my question to the pod was a bit more general... Both on and off that podcast, whenever "important" or "influential" artists come up in conversation, Green Day's name almost never pops up. Dookie will pop-up in rankings of albums but the ranking never feels quite commensurate with their influence, popularity, etc. I would have asked why they felt that was the case.

I was curious for their take but that discussion pretty much outlined what they would say, so there's no need to press "send." Haha.

Yeah, I fully expected indifference from Hyden. But I didn't expect the level of disdain and dismissal of everything post-Dookie while simultaneously acknowledging they haven't engaged. I was legit surprised Ian hadn't heard AI as well but... The whole segment just felt weird for me. Mostly because they usually do a really good job at talking about things that aren't for them and trying to parse out why others are reacting the way they do.

Makes me glad they kept the Blink talk to only discussing the reunion tour and not the album itself. LOL

 

Hyden gets extremely snarky and dismissive when he doesn't like something. One of the glaring problems with the show/his writing for me.