3.5 (out of 4) stars

  Perhaps the only thing more unlikely than releasing a rock opera in 2009 is that it’s a rock opera written and recorded by Green Day. But such is the case with “21st Century Breakdown” (Reprise), which arrives in stores May 15.

    Green Day is that rare beast: a band that still sells lots of albums in an MP3-obsessed, iPod-shuffle era. And rarer still, the band makes albums that demand to be heard as a whole: a collection of conceptually linked songs that is greater than the sum of its parts. 

    The Northern California trio’s previous album, the 2004 release “American Idiot,” was a song cycle about life during war time. In the grand punk tradition of Reagan-era stalwarts the Minutemen, the Meat Puppets and Husker Du, Green Day succeeded in making an album that spoke to and about its generation at a time of political anxiety, fear and anger. Unlike those bands, Green Day was an unmitigated hit. During a decade when CD sales plummeted, “American Idiot” sold nearly 6 million copies domestically and 12 million worldwide.

    Now comes the even more ambitious “21st Century Breakdown,” nothing less than a three-part rock opera that traces the story of two characters, Christian and Gloria, the yin and yang of singer-guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong’s personality. Christian is a rabble-rouser with his finger hovering on the self-destruct button. Gloria is an idealist with hopes of remaking the world.

The album would be a manifesto for a generation trying to make a sense of overseas wars and hometown recession. Thankfully, Armstrong avoids sermonizing. But he does have a few things to get off his chest, and he and his band express themselves with do-or-die boldness.

    In Green Day’s early days, Armstrong saw many of the same problems, and rolled his eyes. He’s a product of the early ‘90s pop-punk brigade, a generation of disenfranchised suburbanites who broadcast their discontent in pithy three-chord anthems. They were bored and stoned; they reacted to the world around them with a shrug of the shoulders, a smirk and a series of one-fingered salutes. Green Day harnessed that disenchantment on the 1994 landmark “Dookie,” a 15-million-selling juggernaut of bratty black humor. 

    As the band aged, it started to recycle itself and sales dropped. No great sin; plenty of bands struggle to maintain relevance. But a funny thing happened on the way to the nostalgia circuit with “American Idiot.” As the band members turned past 30 and began settling down with families, they got not just older but better. Armstrong raised his aim as a songwriter, and bassist Mike Dirnt and drummer Tre Cool kept pace. The trio are omnivorous music fans, and as their range and interests broadened, their music did too.

    Green Day reinvented itself with “American Idiot”; the album’s seriousness and ambition would’ve been unimaginable coming from the band that made “Dookie.”  “21st Century Breakdown” aims even higher, a state of the disunion address delivered by two kids wandering through a landscape where war rages, jobs are scarce and cities slowly disintegrate. At times Armstrong’s earnestness sounds like a Springsteen parody (“She puts her makeup on/like graffiti on the walls of the heartland”); he hasn’t quite mastered the art of the telling detail the way someone like the Hold Steady’s Craig Finn has. And the humor of the “Dookie” era is missed. In its place is a far richer and more varied brand of musical expression.

        Armstrong addresses his own generation (“born into Nixon”) and the next, as represented by his oldest son’s anticipated high-school graduating class (“the class of 13”), but he doesn’t pretend to have answers. He ventures only one piece of advice: “Silence is the enemy/Against your urgency,” he brays in “Know your Enemy.” In other words, participate or perish. That sums up the tone of the album, and presents the biggest difference between the new Green Day and the old, the one that celebrated slacker indifference on “Dookie” and the one that challenges a generation of listeners to engage with the world around them on “21st Century Breakdown.”

        One thing hasn’t changed. The music rocks, only now the snotty, faux-British accent has been replaced by a full-throated cry that owes as much to classic rock as it does to basement punk. Tre Cool has always been the band’s secret weapon, his unrelenting drumming the driving force in songs that push higher and harder. But the dynamics have sharpened, the contrasts become more vivid, thanks to the expansive production of Butch Vig (who has worked with Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins). Now there are intimations of Brecht-Weill cabaret (“Viva La Gloria”) and John Lennon-esque piano ballads (“Last Night on Earth”). Strings and timpani embellish the arrangements, and keyboards provide a breather between guitar-based assaults.

        The exuberant pop-punk of old has morphed into epic Who-style stadium-rock, with thundering drums underpinning windmill chords and shout-from-the-rooftops choruses. Rock operas demand nothing less, and Green Day delivers.

            greg@gregkot.com