21st CENTURY BREAKDOWN

Green Day s dazzlingly ambitious 2004 rock opera American Idiot with it s striking caricature of quot;the President gas manquot; didn t just chime with the anti- Bush post-Iraq invasion zeitgeist; it increasingly came to define it. Five years on 21st Century Breakdown picks up broadly where it s predecessor left off it s 17 songs attempting to make sense of what it means to be angry and alive amid the figurative and literal wreckage left behind by Dubya s presidency. The bad guy may have been run out of town but this is less a victory parade than a trenchant to-do list an album that s as complex as the era that shaped it.