Is the Critical Condition taking up too much of my time? Am I the only one who didn’t know that Green Day has about five thousand side projects?

Because much to my surprise, Green Day has a new album out. Kind of. It’s by a group called Foxboro Hot Tubs, which is really just the members of Green Day playing with a few other guys.

The band’s album–Stop, Drop, and Roll!!!–is like a Zen riddle: When is a Green Day album not a Green Day album?

On the one hand, FHT is making pop-rock (listen here), albeit pop whose bouncy hooks and sunny guitar licks have a tossed-off feeling, as though the band was drinking beer in somebody’s carport and decided that instead of going surfing, they’d just make some killer tunes. (That’s why they’ve been labeled as garage rock, I suppose.)

And low-fi, jangly pop is not really what Green Day’s about. I mean, sure, most of their songs are catchy, but they’re usually too snotty to be considered bubblegum. Even GD’s ballads have spiky edges, while an FHT number like “Red Tide” is a straight-up Beatles homage, and “Dark Side of the Night” might as well be a lost single from Tommy James and the Shondells. (Compare this with this. See what I mean?)

But on the other hand, you can still hear Green Day all over the album. Though the fellas are undeniably stretching themselves, a song like “Sally” is similar to an American Idiot cut like “She’s a Rebel.” And if you take out the background singers going “Yeeaaahhh!” in layered harmonies, “Pieces of Truth” could be the follow-up to “When I Come Around.”

Which leads me to ask: Why call the band Foxboro Hot Tubs? Why not just release this as a Green Day album? Between The Network, Pinhead Gunpowder, The Frustrators, and The Lookouts, aren’t the members of this band already involved in enough offshoots? (All that info comes from Wikipedia, by the way. I hadn’t heard of any of those groups until this afternoon.)

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not complaining. I’ll take a good album under any name you choose, and Stop, Drop, and Roll!! is definitely a good album. I’m just flummoxed about the need to create a brand new entity to release it. Is there more to the story that I’m missing here? If you know the scoop, please let me know!