Thursday, 28 June 2012

American Idiot: The Original Broadway Cast Recording (American Idiot Cast)

Welcome back to another one of my album reviews. I think at least maybe half of you right now that are reading this blog post know who Green Day are and know at least one of the songs that they have made in their more then 20 year long career. Whether you like them or not, Green Day have made their mark on history and have influenced quite a few of today's artists and bands, including Zebrahead, Fall Out Boy, and even Ashlee Simpson. Out of the people reading this that know who Green Day are, there are at least a few of you who know that Green Day and Michael Mayer worked together on adapting Green Days seventh studio album into a one-act, through-sung stage musical on Broadway. They included the main 13 songs, and decided to bring in a few songs from Green Days eighth album 21st Century Breakdown, some of the B-sides off of American Idiot, and the love song that Billie Joe Armstrong, the lead vocalist and guitarist of Green Day, sang to his present day wife. The musical was a huge success and has been getting very enthusiastic remarks from critics including the Boston Herald, the Associated Press, and even Rolling Stone magazine. I've seen some of the live videos of this musical, and believe it or not, it seems like a pretty great show, and I can see why it's been getting such great reviews. Eventually that led me to get the Original Broadway Cast Recording of the musical, and what did I think about it? Well, let's get into that right now shall we?
The original cast of the Broadway adaptation of
American Idiot.

The first thing we're going to look at as we do with all my other reviews of albums is the musical quality and it's OK. It really hurts to me to say that when one of my favourite bands composed all of the music in this musical, but, this particular recording of it just sounds bland. You have Billie, Mike and Tré doing the majority of the instrument recordings, but it still feels very bland to me, also, I don't know why, but this studio recording just sounds too inexpressive. The cast definitely hit all of their notes spot on, as they're trained to perfection for this kind of stuff, but as a great film once said,
Rock and Roll ain't about doing things perfect.
again, the cast are perfect in hitting their marks, but all of the emotion that you can feel in the original Green Day recordings just isn't there, which really just makes the musical quality of this recording feel mediocre. The thing that I like about Green Day is that what Green Day sing about, they truly mean it and want it. With the cast, it just sounds like they're only doing what they're told and aren't going for the extra soul that they can put in it, when I actually know they can pull that feeling off. When I watched those live recordings, I could tell that they were putting every last bit of effort they had into maintaining perfect notes, while making sure the soul of the songs was still there and intact, all the while doing dances and movements on stage that I'd get exhausted doing pretty quickly. If they could pull all that off on stage, why shouldn't they be able to nail the emotion even better just standing inside a studio room? My point is that the vocals and even the instruments in this song are very bland and inexpressive and there's no excuse for it. However, the music when you dig deep down to the heart of it, is still American Idiot, and is still the great album that it truly is, and now with some new and undiscovered songs! Alas, there is another flaw that cancels out this fact. Call this more nit picky then it needs to be, but none of these songs were any of the casts creations. I get that this is an adaptation of something that already exists, but there are some other musicals out there that I've heard are great and have wonderful original songs, like Spring Awakening. You can call this a nitpick if you want and I won't hold it against you, but to me, not being able to be original in any recordings is a flaw to me.

The next thing I'm going to review in this recording is the lyrical quality(if this turns out to be very short, well, sorry in advance if that's bad). Well, again, I have to take a point off because of the face that these lyrics weren't made by the actual cast, which again, is a bad thing in my eye. However, the actual content of the lyrics is pretty damn great, because well, it's Green Day. Short segment even shorter, the lyrics aren't original, but they're very well written.

Lastly, we get to how well the album sounds together. In the actual album, the album sounds great as a whole, and only takes breaks when it needs to, sometimes even seguing the ending of one song to the beginning of the next, which is pretty cool, and sounds cool as well. In this album however, most of those segues are just butchered up, and just made separate songs even more distant from each other and made it obvious that a new song was going to happen, not that the original didn't but the original did it so that it didn't interrupt your musical experience. However, in a way, it makes sense that most of the songs are separate from each other, as they were different musical numbers in the musical, so I'm going to give some sympathy to this recording and give this section a mediocre mark.

Now we get to the final verdict. Musically, this get's a 1/4, there's almost no emotion in the songs, and they weren't even made by the cast. Lyrically, this get's a 2/3, great lyrics, but again, not original. Lastly, as a whole, I give this a 2/3, they got rid of a lot of the segues in the songs, but I give sympathy to it because they were different musical numbers. Which leaves this recording with a 5/10, meaning mediocre, they took what were such wonderful renditions of Green Days work, and just butchered them up into emotionless, unoriginal, crap. Don't get this recording, even though you may be a Green Day fan, or a Broadway fan, or a fan of the musical even, this recording loses a lot of the soul found in Green Day's music, Broadway's show tunes, and the musicals, well, musical numbers. However, again, if you want to hear American Idiot in a whole new light, and you're fine with the criticisms I've described here, even though there are a lot of them,  you might want to go check it out. Well, this is the end of the review, which means, bye, see you later, and hope to see you reading my next review.

3 comments:

  1. Green Day influenced Fall Out Boy eh? That's why they suck so much. (More than Green Day) Never heard of Zebrahead and Ashlee Simpson has even less talent than her sister.

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  2. Can't believe I'm saying this but you are being extremely unfair to this album. I mean critizising the singers hitting the right notes? C'mon! This ISN'T Rock and Roll, it's a Broadway soundtrack. The original wasn't even rock and roll. It was more of a pop album with some punkish overtones. Now I would probably hate this as much as you but for completely different reasons. (Actually I would only hate it because of the original.)

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  3. I'll rate the original album on your scale.
    Music: 1/4. Most of the songs have either trivial melodies or annoying ones. Billie's whining doesn't help at all. It does get a point for having a couple of catchy songs though.
    Lyrics; 0/3. The lyrics to this album sound like they were written by a 12 year old depressed child who wants to express how much the world sucks when he is completely ignorant about it. I can't see how anyone with good taste can listen to these lyrics without cringing.
    Overall Flow: 1/3. (I am not going to talk about how the songs a related to each other because that isn't important. In fact I think that would be a weakness to any album because it shows a lack of diversity and experimentation which are important factors for an album) The story does not flow well at all. In fact there barely is one. Half these songs are just filler bridge the gaps to the "plot" songs. For such a "grand rock opera" the story takes a pretty far back seat.
    Overall: 2/10. Of course if the soundtrack edition DOES have better singing, that version would get an extra point.

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