Dos!

Scratch the party-till-you-puke surface and there's plenty of minor-key darkness lurking below.

It's great to hear them back on home turf, stripped of their last two records' strained conceptualism, instead just spitting out random, bratty nuggets about uncomplicated things like feeling horny and outrageous women. [Jan 2013, p.94]

Musical joie de vivre courses through Dos!, along with enough variety to ensure this is more than just, um, Uno! Part 2. [10 Nov 2012, p.52]

Clearly, all the partying caught up to [Billie Joe Armstrong], but while he was racing recklessly, he cut this terrific little party record.

Some songs' lyrics feel a bit too rote ("Makeout Party," "Lazy Bones") but that's when you realize Green Day never really had all that much to say in the first place, and they function at their best with hook-filled songs that are typically three minutes or less. Luckily for us, ¡Dos! is full of those tracks, and is definitely the highlight of the band's ongoing trilogy to date.

Twenty years on from "Kerplunk," Green Day couldn't possibly replicate its early urgency, but the band can manage to keep its sound nicely unhinged.

Dos! is a reliably fun, garagey treat--and should be viewed as no more than that.

Everything about ¡Dos! is a step up from the last go-round, as if the previous LP was a mere dress rehearsal for the proper show,

Armstrong, Mike Dirnt and Tré Cool harness the sound of immolating, teenage-wasteland lust for an album with a distinct sense of life coming off the rails.

They're much more at ease losing themselves in power-pop harmonies on Lazy Bones and embracing '60s garage on Stop When The Red Lights Flash. [Jan 2013, p.108]

Dos!, the aptly named second part of the trilogy, is relieved of the weight of expectation and, though it was recorded at the same time as the first, sounds less strained.

Judging from the spirited but wildly inconsistent material on this trilogy's first two entries, a little quality control would've helped, perhaps funneling the best of the three albums into one solid offering.

For all their fitful moments of greatness, these albums remain too cluttered with filler to measure up against the best of the band's stuff, though ¡Dos! is a tentative step in the right direction.

While the album is agreeably jejune in a way that recalls the band's Dookie era, only a handful of its tracks are truly essential additions to the Green Day catalogue.

On "Lazy Bones," that confessional spirit adds urgency to the band's power-chord crunch. Elsewhere, though, there's a troubling lack of focus.

Aside from a few solid, unspectacular pop-rock songs though, ¡Dos! Has only one thing to offer: it makes ¡Uno! sound a hell of a lot better.

It's neither particularly accessible nor a nostalgic feast for fans of 90s pop-punk. Instead, it seems like part of an as-yet-incomplete whole.

Dos! is the sophomore slump of a trilogy that's shaping up to be far less fun than it was supposed to be.

When it comes down to it, the second part of Green Day's trilogy of albums is another crushing disappointment.

Part two of Green Day's album triptych finds them flailing ever further from the pop nous that has underscored their finest moments, as they plod through a set that's oddly leaden and largely witless.

With a lack of depth, a messy focus, and a bloated sense of evolution, ¡Dos! isn't only a forgettable sequel to a bland predecessor, but a slip down the ladder Green Day has attempted to extend for over a decade.

With its terrible lyrics, uninspired and generic music and general sense of boredom, the only positive to glean from the wreckage was at least it couldn't get worse.