Green Day's dazzlingly ambitious 2004 rock opera American Idiot, with it's striking caricature of "the President gas man", 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.
