Green Day at the United Center

I finished off our little vacation weekend by going solo to the United Center to see Green Day. Their newest cd, "21st Century Breakdown," isn't as great as their previous cd "American Idiot," but they can be forgiven for that since that was a career pinnacle.

The show was opened by the New York band The Bravery, who I have to give a lot of credit to, since they are creative and original... at finding new ways to suck. (Sorry, borrowed that joke from Triumph the Insult Comic Dog). They are the one band out there who prove that the whole dance rock sound that is big right now can be really lame and uninteresting. Well done guys.

I don't know who's scheduling idea it was, but Green Day then didn't take the stage until 9 PM on a Monday night. There were a lot of young kids in the audience, so I don't know if they all made it through the show or not, but I wasn't thrilled about that since I had to wake up at 5 the next morning. Oh well, enough about me.

The setlist pretty much stuck exactly to what they have played at every other stop so far on the tour, which is fine since they had a huge video display behind them, and plenty of pyrotechnics timed in sync with the show. The first part of the show focused on the newest album, with the strongest tracks leading off. After touching on a few of the highlights from America Idiot, they then plowed through most of their biggest hits from their earlier days.

The band did keep it pretty fun for the most part, they literally got the audience involved as much as possible, by bringing some fans up to sing verses from "Longview," and by giving one very young fan the chance to play all of the guitar lines in the American Idiot standout "Jesus of Suburbia."

The only problem I had with the show (aside from the late start time, being Mr. Old Man) was that alot of the singalong parts got dragged out way too long, and there were about 10 too many "heeyyyyy ooooohhh" chants that dragged on too long. Plus, for the second time that I've seen them, they drag out "King for a Day" and make it into a medley with "Shout," and that ends up taking up about 10 minutes of show time that could have been spent playing anything else off of American Idiot, like "The Death of St. Jimmy" or "Whatshername." Oh well.

It was a great show, they probably broke a few curfew laws in the process, but proved once again that they are one of the top bands in the country right now.