Reflecting Pool: Green Day - Nimrod

Consider this a different kind of Listening Post and more like a Reflections Column. With Reflecting Pool I will be going back through the catalog of bands that I love and have been following for years. I will try to be as impartial as possible, but I admit that I am biased. This is a little more loosey than the LPs.




Green Day - Nimrod - 1997 (iTunes - Amazon

I've never heard this album. Something must have happened between Insomniac and....wait a minnit! Yep. I had a lot of....personal shit going on. Divorce, sick kid, custody....hmm. In fact, upon reflection, I didn't even get Insomniac until around the time that this came out. So I was pretty behind in my Green Day.
And then I heard so many bad things about this record that I just eschewed it completely.
I don't really think I was missing anything.
It's not bad, per se. Billie Joe Armstrong is such a good pop/rock song writer that it's a fait accompli that the album will be listenable. And it is. It's still aggro-punk in places. But, right at the middle of the album, there is this instrumental track, Last Ride In, which many punks may have taken for a little bit o' irony. It's a surf tune in the Ventures vein. But i think it's more of a harbinger of things to come.
This is the longest GD record so far and it's packed with the familiar strains, the great chord progressions, the catchy as hell choruses, the fury and speed. 18 songs and only two clock in at over 3 1/2 minutes. The aforementioned instru-ventures track and the ballad that would cement the rejection of the punk world that turned it's back on the band after they went multi-plat with Dookie and give them their biggest single crossover hit; Good Riddance (Time of Your Life). A song lucky enough to carry on the grand tradition of angry songs mistaken for having uplifting messages. One by U2, Born in the USA, By Springsteen are examples.
Songs like Platypus and Take it Back are SO punk that I am surprised that that community turned their backs on Green Day as traitors to the cause so vehemently. Their loss. But these songs, while harkening back to GD's roots, are bad.
I do love that Reject was written as a response to an exchange that Armstrong had with the mother of a kid who was a fan. (From Wikipedia: "Reject" came from an incident where a boy received Green Day's previous album, Insomniac for his eighth birthday from his grandma. The boy started singing Green Day's songs (with explicit lyrics), and his mother got angry and wrote a complaint letter to Armstrong; Armstrong wrote an actual letter back to her, and this song was based on his response.
At the time this came out, I would have been bored with Dookie and Insomniac and I would have welcomed more songs by the band. This is a good pace holder. But you don't need anything but the singles. Well, King for a Day is fun.

Grade C+
A Side: Good Riddance (Time of Your Life), Hitchin' A Ride, Nice Guys Finish Last
BlindSide: Jinx, Haushinka, King for a Day
Downside: (I'm gonna catch hell for this but....) Platypus & Worry Rock.