Upon its release, listeners with an eye for liner notes learned that for the first time since 1992, Rob Cavallo’s services as producer were not employed. A clue as to the restrained nature of much of the new material first emerged months earlier with the news that Scott Litt would be taking charge of affairs in the studio. But chemistry between Green Day and the man best known for his work with R.E.M. was at a premium. Following disagreements regarding the direction Warning should take, the two parties amicably divorced. “It just didn’t work out,” said Billie Joe. “He was really cool, but for that particular project it just wasn’t the right chemistry.”
In the Kerrang! review of Warning, writer Paul Travers quoted the line ‘It’s a compromise’, from Church On Sunday, and reckoned it to be indicative of the album as a whole. This, though, is unfair. This 12-song set may have lacked cohesion, as well as containing several songs that sound underdeveloped (of which Fashion Victim is the starkest example), but the record’s distance from the albums that preceded it is courageous. Even so, in too many places this is a collection that lacks fizz. Had the song Deadbeat Holiday, for example, featured on Nimrod, it would bounce with life, but on Warning it is a vehicle not worthy of a couplet such as, ‘Christmas lights in the middle of August, grudges come back to haunt us.’ Elsewhere, Castaway, Hold On and Jackass are neither here, there, or anywhere really.
But when Warning does attain elevated status, it takes flight with a graceful ease. And two songs from its ranks frequently remain in Green Day’s live set. One is Minority, the album’s lead-off single, in which, to a manic marching-band beat, Billie Joe sings of, ‘One light, one mind, flashing in the dark / Blinded by the silence of a thousand broken hearts.’ The second is Waiting, a gorgeous and patient mind-blower that has enjoyed the good fortune of not falling by the wayside in the manner of other deeper cuts such as Uptight, Restless Heart Syndrome and Brutal Love.