new album Green Day - ¡Dos!

 The second installment in Green Day's ambitious trilogy of albums opens with "See You Tonight," a bare, ragged benediction where Everly Brothers harmonies mask stalker-y undercurrents, and puppy love might turn nasty if you don't text back soon. Like ¡Uno!, ¡Dos! is full of these moments, where the band follows lineal threads from Dookie-era punk into all manner of overheated angst – nervy-Jam mod soul on "Stray Heart," Who-mad maximum R&B on "Wow! That's Loud," even mascara-streaked soul balladry on the album-closing "Amy," where Billie Joe Armstrong makes like the skate-park Sam Cooke.

Armstrong, Mike Dirnt and Tré Cool harness the sound of immolating, teenage-wasteland lust for an album with a distinct sense of life coming off the rails: "I can't stand for fallin' down/I'm too sick to throw up," Armstrong sings against a Wipers-like downstroke riff on "Lazy Bones." He went to rehab in September. Yet while you can read all the pathos you want into "Ashley," a plea for a meth-addicted friend that comes on like a runaway ambulance, the angst here is as archetypal as it is personal. At times, it's just as election year urgent as American Idiot, despite being packaged as a batch of shit-hot punk purges with titles like "Fuck Time" rather than a grand rock opera. "I'll trade you blood for dirty cash," Armstrong promises on "Stop When the Red Lights Flash." In any guise, dude channels the voice of America. 

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