International Superhits!

iTunes Review

Rising from the scene in Berkeley, CA, teen punkers Green Day left behind the colorful, graffiti’d walls of the all-ages, “punk playhouse” known as Gilman Street for the bright lights of stadium rock-fests. Losing a few thousand hardcore fans along the way, the trio made up for it with a few million new ones: young, suburban kids whose knowledge of the Ramones and the Beatles was scant, but whose hunger for music that spoke to them was fierce. This collection of hits came out a few years before their huge, theatrical American Idiot album took listeners by storm in 2004. Keeping that in mind — along with the fact that the band’s early, indie-label output is not really represented here, either — International Superhits serves as a fine overview of the band’s "Major Label Career, Chapter One." Pulling several hits each from albums Dookie (1994), Insomniac (1995), Nimrod (1997), and Warning (2000), Green Day never sounded better than they do here, with inevitable chaff filtered out and only the strong stuff left to do the job. The sheer strength of Billie Joe Armstrong’s songwriting alone is something to marvel at, let alone the band’s ability to cloak his words in skin-tight, razor-sharp arrangements that hit like a punch to stomach, but then soften the blow with pure pop underpinnings.