Title: 1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours
Artist: Green Day
Rating: 2 out of 5
From a recent favorite album to an album of my ever-increasingly distant youth. I purchased this album in a small record shop in Boston while visiting Harvard for a disastrous debate tournament my senior year of high school. I’m pretty sure that Dookie had probably already hit the airwaves by the time of the trip or I doubt I would have heard of Green Day considering that my musical diet at the time was a strict combination of grunge and rockabilly.
The surprising thing about this album is how little different it is from just about everything Green Day has ever produced. You can definitely tell that they would definitely get better producers and mixers later on and thankfully they don’t stretch themselves into any melodramatic ballads like “Time of Your Life”. However, you also can’t find any track on this album that contains anything to distinguish it from every other song. Heck, the time signature and tempos are almost identical across the entire album. The closest thing to a musical stretch here is the droning tones on “Rest” and the slightly bouncy dance beat on “Knowledge”. Beyond that it is an astoundingly repetitive and boring album.
The only reason this album gets two stars is that it has somehow survived in my album collection for the last 19 years which is a minor achievement worthy of some sort of recognition.