I always thought Nimrod was the headstone on Green Day's surprisingly long string of quality albums. "Prosthetic Head" sounded like a coda to their body of work as a whole, like a giant, unstoppable machine winding down to its last drops of fuel. What followed seemed like reality catching up to the band: How does a group that made its name singing about masturbation and smoking way too much weed make the move to being "serious artists"? Well, uh... they didn't, really, to which Warning and American Idiot surely attest. Which is not to say the band were out of good ideas; their new-wave side project The Network proved beyond a shadow of a doubt, as Money Money 2020 remains one of my favorite works by the group, an album I find myself much more inclined to visit than most of their other albums.
But what of Foxboro Hot Tubs, their newest ‘secret’ project? Like The Network, the band members have made no statement regarding the group (or its unfortunate name), and, also like The Network, they will fool absolutely no one: Billie Joe Armstrong's vocals are about as easy to spot as the sun on an afternoon in the Sahara. They've again chosen to follow a hyper-specific muse according to all the press I've seen on the Stop, Drop, and Roll EP, this time picking 1960s garage rock, which should come as no surprise to those familiar with the group's influences. Yes, no shocks so far. But then you throw on the EP to find Green Day sounding like their early selves for the first time in the better part of a decade; jaws drop, ears turn themselves inside out, and the very fabric of the universe as we know it begins to unravel into the two simple chords of the opening title track.
Holy Shit, it's Green Day!
At which point the disappointment inevitably begins to set in. While Green Day might be writing early Green Day songs again, it's clear they're a bit rusty or are perhaps allowing their muse to draw them slightly off the mark. Armstrong's now classically trained singing is one of the many unfamiliar elements marking this release as definitively post-Warning, as well as his newly acquired emo-scream employed not-so-tastefully throughout. But the snapping chords of "Ruby Room" and the soaring chorus of "She's a Saint, Not a Celebrity" get my spine tingling like I'm in middle school again, and the lead single "Mother Mary" actually kind of makes me want to... dance?
This clearly isn't Green Day circa 1994. You can't mosh to much (or any) of it, but I suppose that's just fine for most Green Day fans, if not for what might have been their core base of fans if some other, similar Lookout! Records artist -- Screeching Weasel, for one -- had been spontaneously shot into international superstardom in their stead. Rather, it sounds like what the band should have released, and probably could have, after Nimrod. Perhaps it's best they didn't, as the path they've taken has made Green Day one of the richest bands in the history of music, and it's pretty fucking hard to argue with that.
That said, these songs don't really have much staying power. Some people might connect with this music on a deep, personal level, but it's just not happening for me, as much as I wish it would. I'd never put any of these songs in a mix or on an iPod playlist. Instead, Stop, Drop, and Roll has fallen firmly into the same camp as American Idiot: something to listen to on repeat for a day or three every year, just to scratch some weird musical itch left over from puberty that I couldn't explain even if I tried. Still, although the music doesn't quite stand on its own, this EP -- pleasingly sequenced as a 7-inch -- has done us a great service in reminding us of Green Day pre-"Boulevard Of Broken Dreams," something none of their recent singles have even approximated. It's really too bad they felt they had to use an assumed name to do it.
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