Album review: Green Day’s Tre!

The final part of Green Day’s album trilogy explains why they didn’t dump two thirds of the songs and make one album of nothing but killer songs: even across three discs, they couldn’t come up with one album of nothing but killer songs. That’s not to say Tre! is a turkey: like its predecessors, it’s got some pretty good songs but they never get better than pretty good. What’s more, some of the steals here are so obvious as to be jaw-dropping, even if the sources are unexpected: the opening Brutal Love is all but a note-for-note re-creation of Sam Cooke’s Bring It on Home to Me; Missing You takes its bridge from the Who’s Mary Anne With the Shaky Hand; Dirty Rotten Bastards from the refrain of Carmen’s Toreador Song. Green Day haven’t forgotten how to write a tune — 99 Revolutions is a blast, for all its asinine lyrics but as the trilogy draws to a close, you feel Green Day have built nothing more than a folly.