MXPX – Let`s Rock

In the late nineties, MXPX were one of the bands in the forefront of the pop-punk world. Everywhere you looked they were playing Responsibility and Punk Rawk Show. In essence, they were leading the pack into the new millennium. But then things started to go downhill, and after their dismal 2003 release,Before Everything & After, people simply wrote the band off. Luckily they picked it up a notch when they left the strangles of the major labels and joined SideOneDummy to release Panic, an album that wasn’t as good as their previous efforts but was a much stronger release than it’s predecessor. Now the band is back, but with a compilation of b-sides which, if you know the history of MXPX, gets you wondering why they’d do another compilation? With one b-side album and a best-of compilation already released and the b-side album being prepared for re-release with a bonus DVD, you wonder how many more b-sides and spare tracks does this band have? And after a while, shouldn’t it be clear as to why they were cut from the album in the first place? Sadly, that is where Let’s Rock really falls short.

The b-sides on here are all post-2000 outputs, which means you normally get more softer and more polished tracks and makes the album fall victim to the generic traits of the pop-punk sound. The opening track, You Walk, I Run is a slightly lackluster effort with some overly-nasally vocal performance that hinders the track. It makes the album start off with a stumble that they don’t really rectify until the third track, 1 and 3 which sees the band return to a slightly harder and faster sound while still maintaining the pop-punk moniker. This type of unevenness tends to be present throughout most of the album. You’ll get some great pop-punk anthem like Make Up Your Mind which shows how Mike can still sing without going soft and ultra nasally, quickly followed up by a slightly forgettable track that is okay, but nothing worth multiple repeats.

They end the album with three acoustic efforts, which have their own sets of ups and downs. Sweet Sweet Thing is a nice love ballad with a very compelling story line about meeting the disapproving parents of your girlfriend. Personally, I love the lyrics but I can easily see why some people would scoff at them (My eyes were brown and my hair was blue/ of course they had a problem with my tattoos / I can’t please everyone all the time/ right now all I want to do is make you mine).The problem I tend to have is the transition between this and the following track, This Train, they sound too similar and you are thrown off by the sudden change in lyrical content. All they would need to do to fix it would be to delay the gap an extra second or two, but as it is now they just merge together and it feels disjointed.

When it comes down to it, I still love MXPX. This album is far from great, and you can tell why most of the songs are stuck in the “b-side” category, but there’s still enough solid tracks to keep you listening. MXPX fans and pop-punk fans will like it, but it is far from great and you hope that their next release will build off of Panic rather than Let’s Rock.