"I'm not f***ing around!" snarls Billie Joe Armstrong some 45 minutes into the expansive '21st Century Breakdown'. He's right.

The band's three-act rock opera is diverse in subject matter — hypocrisy of religion, self-destruction, Hurricane Katrina, the bullshit on TV, drug addiction, the global financial meltdown, tabloid culture, pharmaceuticals, Homeland Security — and musical styles — snotty two-chord punk, Springsteen arena rock, The Kinks- and The Who-worshiping '60s Britpop, even the sounds of a gypsy carnival.

But the album's dazzling focus is as blindingly obvious as its grand scope. Ostensibly the story of two young lovers (the impulsive Christian and idealistic Gloria) left to fend for themselves when church, state and adults won't, the sequel to 'American Idiot' is really a commentary on surviving the wasteland that is post-Bush America. Certainly there's hope and a sense of liberation — the collection ends with a song called 'See The Light' — but Armstrong certainly doesn't claim to have the answers.

He's just as confused as anybody else — and yet Green Day have never sounded quite so confident. With lessons learned from their last outing, songs are shorter, punchier — no nine-minute sagas this time — and, thanks to Butch Vig's muscular production, more powerful.

Both the seismic-shifting title track and lighter-anthem-in-waiting '21 Guns' benefit from the same Beatles pop polish that powered Nirvana's 'Nevermind'. 'Christian's Inferno' flames with all the intensity of The Stooges on Prozac, and the unapologetic love song 'Last Night On Earth' is their biggest ballad ever — a grand strings and piano '70s epic that's anything but sappy.

Ambitious, moving and perfectly accomplished, it embodies the qualities of '21st Century Breakdown'. Four years in the making, it's an instant classic.