Home > Denver Music > CD Review > Foxboro Hot Tubs, 'Stop Drop and Roll!!!'

Backstory: This mysterious ‘60s-inspired garage-rock trio from Oakland, Calif., came out of nowhere with a Strokes-meets-Kinks rock radio hit, “Mother Mary,” and…oh, c’mon, you already know the punchline. It’s Green Day!

Why you should care: Because no matter what anyone says, this is Green Day’s follow-up to “American Idiot,” one of the bestselling and most influential rock records of the past decade.

Verdict: By deliberately sidestepping the “what are they gonna do next?” question, Billie Joe Armstrong and company have reminded us of what made them such a great pop-punk band in the first place. For all its obvious stylistic homages—those jangly Dave Davies power chords, the cheesy vintage keyboards, the Entwistle-style bass fills on “27th Ave. Shuffle”—the music on “Stop Drop and Roll!!!” is so refreshingly lively, melodic and free of any “American Idiot”–style pretensions that it qualifies as some kind of revelation. Oh, yeah—these really are still the guys who wrote “Longview” and “Welcome to Paradise” (the latter of which Armstrong cribs from here for the chorus of the Donovan-esque, flute-filled “Dark Side of Night”).

X-Factor: Foxboro Hot Tubs are playing a limited number of club shows. Tickets are, as you might imagine, harder to come by than an original copy of “Slappy” on seven-inch vinyl.