The Good: Some decent lyrics, music and vocals
The Bad: A lot of live pretense, DVD is nothing to shout about, Juvenile moments
The Basics: Despite the rebellious nature of the lyrics and shouts from stage, this live album and matching DVD offer little to anyone other than obsessive Green Day fans.
Green Day is hit or miss for me. I've never listened to one of their albums before today and my judgment of them comes almost entirely on a single to single basis. They've had songs I like ("Boulevard Of Broken Dreams"), songs I'm amused at how people don't "get" them (most people seem to only see the parenthetical of "Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life)" ), and some that just don't grab me "Holiday."
Bullet In A Bible is a two-disc set that features the live album Bullet In A Bible and a DVD presentation of the concert the album was made from. With fourteen (or nineteen, depending on perspective) tracks, this is a substantial live album with a lot of Green Day favorites culled primarily from their studio albums American Idiot, Warning and Nimrod. The DVD follows the same track list with lead singer/lyricist Billie Joe Armstrong commenting on the concert, the albums, the individual tracks.
Here's the thing: Bullet In A Bible is probably wonderful for fans of Green Day. But to someone who is not a die-hard fan, this is overkill and pointless. Live albums may certainly have a place in any respected artist's arsenal of albums. But when a live album is produced, it's different from attending a show in that the statement an artist is making is that this is an event, something worth preserving for posterity. This means the album/show should do one of three things: 1. Be truly amazing, 2. Take the place of a Greatest Hits album and provide a medium for all a group's classic songs to be side by side on an album, and/or 3. Provide a presentation of the music that reinterprets the established songs in such a way that it is so distinctly different from the album versions that it becomes an entirely different listening experience.
Bullet In A Bible does none of those things.
As far as the live aspect of the album, most of the songs played follow along the established lines of the songs. "American Idiot," "Holiday," "Boulevard of Broken Dreams," and "Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life)" all are arranged as they were presented on the radio. They all sound essentially like their singles and a friend of mine who is more a fan of Green Day informed me that the other tracks essentially fall along already established lines.
So, what are we getting from this live album? Billie Jo Armstrong shouting out about how great England is is about all that is unique to this album. This takes on almost the life of a parody as the album progresses and Armstrong randomly shouts out "England!" as if leading a charge or trying to remind the audience where in the world they are. It's silly.
As well, there's nothing extraordinary about the audience reaction. Their reactions are perfectly produced on the audio version to accent each piece, they sing when they are told to and when Armstrong yells for them to do something they do it. On the c.d. this takes on more of a disturbing tenor than the implication of a communal event. Armstrong had the charisma and force of a cult leader as opposed to a band leader.
With the audience noises and the spontaneous, energized shouting from the stage to the audience, the c.d. holds up very poorly over repeated listens. This live album suffers from being exactly what it is; a recording of a live event. Concerts one attends are dramatically different from recordings of them. Being at a concert puts one in a specific time and place with a specific energy and intensity. Far too often, recordings of them are simply copies, pale recreations of events as they happened and they are seldom as meaningful as to those who were there. Bullet In A Bible suffers in that way.
The DVD is analogous to watching a DVD of the Super Bowl. You watch it once and everything is new, different and surprising. Perhaps you pull it out again to watch a great play, but if you watch the whole thing again, it's unsurprising and rulings that upset you the first time have mellowed into the work that it became. If you watch it a third time, odds are you don't even make popcorn for it. The fourth time you put it on, it's background noise while doing your taxes. My point here is not that the DVD is bad necessarily, but rather that if you've seen it once, you've seen it enough. This is not a concert that grows on the listener/viewer and as someone who was not at the concert, this particular experience brings back no special memories and it didn't wow me as far as the performance being anything different or unique.
The only amusement derived from the DVD that's not available on the c.d. is watching Billie Joe Armstrong strutting around in a king's hat and velvet cape.
It's not enough. The concert recording is a fairly common pop-rock-punk performance that is unmemorable. Over repeated listens to the c.d., the audience noises and yells from stage to audience became tired and banal.
On a closing note, Green Day took some serious flack (like from the lead singer of The Killers) for making comments on the state of the U.S. government while over in England (which is where this concert was recorded). The only refreshing thing about Bullet In A Bible is the candor with which Armstrong and Green Day actually REBEL. Where they do it is unimportant, the statements are not undermining the U.S. more or less by speaking them to our allies, especially the ones who have so closely integrated their scandals and sinking ships with ours. My point here is that there's not an ounce of criticism in this review for the politics of Green Day and I think such charges are overblown and silly.
What's vastly more problematic is the lack of originality and the way Bullet In A Bible offers nothing distinctly new to music fans.
For other live albums, please check out my reviews of:
Stripped - The Rolling Stones
James Taylor Live - James Taylor
Familiar To Millions - Oasis
3.5/10
Check out how this album stacks up against others I have reviewed by visiting my Music Review Index Page where the albums and singles are ranked from best to worst.
© 2013, 2007 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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