A home-recorded, stopgap release for the non-secular Green Day, The Renaissance EP intends to take the band's own early, ostensibly anarcho-Christian thrashing about and combine it with their later, relatively major-label polish.

"This is our interpretation of what our first three records may have sounded like if we had recorded the songs at the present time," says frontman Mike Herrera.

The thing is, though, is that the band's progress has hardly shown the widest grasp.

MxPx knows their way around a pop-punk hook -- which is more than one can say about much of the so-called punk revival -- but their tiresome riffing and bankrupt loyalty to a bygone era keeps them relegated to preaching to the converted, while the recombination of their own DNA, well-intentioned or not, still more or less sounds like Adverts records for the kind of guy who has all of the Tony Hawk combos memorized.