Green Day - Tre

After the promising ¡Uno! and the fairly disappointing ¡Dos!, Green Day brings us their final instalment of a trilogy which has had plenty of highs and lows. ¡Tre! is an album bursting with energy and excitement but, unlike its predecessor, has real emotion running right the way through it.

Opener 'Brutal Love' is a mellow and reflective beginning to an album which has a ton of shifts and turns in a handful of different directions. It's a song with a nostalgic charm, initially reminiscent of the eerily beautiful 'Just You' from Twin Peaks. There's also a touch of saxophone which works really well in the song and shows Green Day are always looking to expand their sound even if this trilogy is mainly about going back to their roots.

'Missing You' is a great pop-punk number which indicates the band can still produce relevant Blink 182-type songs with engrossing hooks which stay simple yet interesting. 'Drama Queen' must mean a great deal to frontman Billie Joe Armstrong as he often performed it during the band's 21st Century Breakdown tour in 2010. It sounds like it harks back to the beautifully crafted songs of Paul McCartney and American artists like Tom Petty.

There are some songs which do exactly what you'd expect on a Green Day album. On 'Sex, Drugs & Violence' we even hear bassist Mike Dirnt have a crack at singing which surprisingly works well, while 'Little Boy Named Train' is the kind of song with no clear meaning, but it sounds like a track Armstrong's side project Pinhead Gunpowder would pen, which isn't a bad thing either.

One of the main triumphs, however, is 'Dirty Rotten Bastards', which sounds like a song Green Day have been dying to put on an album for years. With its Irish influences, it would be a perfect fit for a bouncy Dublin pub on a Saturday night. At six-and-a-half minutes, it's also a reminder that Green Day like to take their time occasionally. The nine-minute outings of 'Jesus of Suburbia' and 'Homecoming' seem a distant memory, but this band do it their own way, and if writing a tempo-shifting mammoth is what they want then they do it. Also look out for the guitar solo at 4:20, which sounds exactly like 'Do They Know It's Christmas?'. It definitely sounds like Green Day are getting into the Christmas spirit.

The album ends with 'The Forgotten', which is now officially a Twilight song. But that shuddering thought doesn't take anything away from the fact it's a really enjoyable song and one which mirrors the beginning of the album in that ¡Tre! feels like both a celebration and reflection for the band. With the touring future of the band uncertain, it's hard to know what will happen from here on, but ¡Tre! is possibly the strongest release in the trilogy and that's good enough for the average Green Day fan.