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Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
Foxboro Hot Tubs - Stop Drop And Roll!!!Posted by Scott Heisel on 27-May-08 @ 08:48 PM
[3/5] When you're responsible for one of punk's--nay, rock's biggest albums in years (2004's American Idiot), there's really only one way to decompress if you're Green Day: Recruit a handful of friends, write a bunch of surf/garage-rock stompers with no real socio-political motivation and take up a false identity. Thus, we end up with Foxboro Hot Tubs and their debut album Stop Drop And Roll!!!. At 12 songs and a shade over a half-hour in length, it's the first new, original music we've heard from Bille Joe Armstrong & Co. in nearly four years. While they're more than just Green Day dressed up in leopard-print (and they're quite a bit better than the trio's former side band, the new-wave-tinged one-off the Network), Foxboro Hot Tubs suffer from soundalike syndrome.From the drum fill kicking off the opening title track, the energy on Stop is in the rafters for most of the disc, with Armstrong's vocal swagger really hitting in the chugging "Ruby Room" and the fast-paced, bluesy "27th Ave. Shuffle," two of the disc's most memorable songs. But for every hit there seems to be a miss, as "Dark Side Of Night," with its jazz flute lead, sounds cheesy and forced, and "Alligator" is a direct rip of the Kinks' "You Really Got Me." (You thought the band would've learned to stop lifting hooks from the Davies brothers after being busted for stealing the bass line of "Picture Book" for 2000's "Warning.") Elsewhere on the record, the dragging "Sally" sounds like the Dave Clark 5's "Stepping Stone" without the explosive chorus the original had and, strangely, some serious tempo issues. It's great to see Armstrong and his core bandmates, bassist Mike Dirnt and drummer Tre Cool, playing fun, no-pressure music after the beast that was American Idiot essentially commandeered their lives for a few years. It's also respectable that the trio decided not to shove the Hot Tubs down peoples' throats as new Green Day output as it certainly wouldn't be warmly received by the legions of teens they acquired with their last record (although "Red Tide" isn't too far removed from Nimrod's "Last Ride In," and "The Pedestrian" could be the first cousin of Warning's "Minority"). Hopefully, this album and subsequent small-club tour will be enough to let Green Day get back to what they do best--be Green Day. (JINGLE TOWN) Scott Heisel  Official Website: http://www.foxborohottubs.com
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Foxboro Hot Tubs are amazingly amazing.