MY VIEW
Music: 'American Idiot' by Green Day

The Verdict: Five. THE RATINGS 5 — Outstanding: Add it to your collection now. A must-have. 4 — Great: Buy it or rent it — definitely listen to it. 3 — Good: Worth listening to despite some flaws. 2 — Fair: Unless you're a fan of the group or singer, don't bother. 1 — Poor: Save your money (and your ears).

Style: Pop/rock.

Rewind: "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" (track 4), "Jesus of Suburbia" (track 2), "Wake Me Up When September Ends" (track 11), "Are We Waiting" (track 5).

Skip: "St. Jimmy" (track 6).

My take: Green Day returns to the music scene after a four-year hiatus with its newest album, "American Idiot." Its last CD, 2000's highly underrated "Warning," had a mellow storyteller vibe to it, but with "Idiot" Green Day uses a totally different approach, one filled with breakneck guitar riffs, lyrics that are as catchy as they are witty, and vocals laced with a Billy Idol-like snarl.

Fans of old Green Day material will be pleased with the throwback to their punk-rock days; fans of the newer stuff will likely be entertained with singer/guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong's versatility as a songwriter, which he has been developing over the past two albums.

Throughout the record, the band excels in two areas: exploring the depths of musical talents and relating to their teenage fans, despite being past 30 years old. Examples of such exploration are "Jesus of Suburbia" and "Homecoming," both of which are tracks that run more than nine minutes long and consist of four shorter songs made into one epic track.

"American Idiot" also is diverse. While the somber "Wake Me Up When September Ends" is a story of hardships while growing up set to an acoustic guitar, the title track of "American Idiot" sports lines that bash the president and the state of the media while keeping a sugar-coated voice with lyrics such as "Everybody do the propaganda! Sing along with the age of paranoia."

However, the real standout track in the album is the current radio single "Boulevard of Broken Dreams," a tale of loneliness that everyone who went through the teenage years should be able to relate to, with lines like "I'm walking down the line / that divides me somewhere in my mind / On the border line / Of the edge and where I walk alone."

In the music business, four years is a long time. If you're gone for that long, you run the risk of being forgotten or coming back to higher-than-reachable standards. But when you're a band like Green Day, not only can you go away for that long but you can return from that break and deliver a near-perfect record that is better than almost anything you've done before.

Jeremy Castillo is a student at Windward Community College.

Have a game or CD you want to review? Reach Island Life deputy editor Dave Dondoneau at ddondoneau@honoluluadvertiser.com.