Green Day Shenanigans (2002) Reprise

With this "new" album Green Day have put all of their B-sides, soundtrack contributions, and cover songs on one convenient album. For those of us who are fans, but not into vinyl and single collecting, it provides and easy and cheap way of occurring these rare tracks. One thing that bothered me that there were only 14 tracks, I would have thought that a band that has been around for so long, and has the money to get in the studio anytime they want, would have more stuff to include on this type of album.

The tracks sound like they were taken from the "Dookie", Insomniac", and "Nimrod" sessions. The songs all sound decent, no real terrible ones, and a couple of standouts like 'Ha Ha Your Dead", Scumbag". "Suffocate", and "Desensitized" that I'm surprised never made it onto an album.

Green Day also included three covers that ranged from excellent to poor. I thought that their version of Fang's "I wanna be on TV" was excellent, a great example of Green Day straight foward Punk Rock. Dee Dee Ramone's (RIP) "Outsider" is done in typical GD fashion, but still is a catchy song that I really enjoyed. The Monkee's "Tired of Waiting for You" is done like they were actually trying to make it sound like the original. I really didn't care for it, it wasn't funny, interesting, and I found myself skipping over it while listening to the cd.

Overall the songs all have the traditional Green Day sound to them, so dot buy this expecting GD experimenting with new sounds or directions. While this disc was a good piece of pop punk and helped me complete my GD collection, I felt that overall the album lacked the over quality that is found on their other albums, but then that's what happens with a collection of songs written over long time span. I would suggest this to people that are big Green Day fans, you really need to own a majority of their other albums to get the full enjoyment of this disc. If you're not a big fan or new to GD then skip this one for awhile and get an older one, it will represent the band better and justify the (deserved) hype surrounding them.

(Moldy)