Green Day - 21st Century Breakdown

Green Day - 21st Century BreakdownGreen Day's dazzlingly ambitious 2004 rock opera American Idiot, with it's striking caricature of "the President gas man", didn't just chime with the anti Bush post Iraq invasion zeitgeist; it increasingly came to define it. Five years on, 21st Century Breakdown picks up broadly where it's predecessor left off, it's 17 songs attempting to make sense of what it means to be angry and alive amid the figurative and literal wreckage left behind by Dubya's

expanding to a four-piece with Nate Kinsella and continuing their musical journey

and enveloping electronica

but wiser now

as well as those well-established

Features guest appearances from Mavis Staples and Gary Clark

and fear of men

Originally released on Cowley's own Megatone imprint in 1982 the album marks a definitive change in direction of post-disco dance music

Feel Good delivers tracks that feel like a river cruise through dreamy soundscapes

She created a new vocal processing technique

In particular

Micalizzi and Bacalov with 12 tracks full of funky beats

but their elegant arrangements and harmonies