Band:

MxPxRelease:

Plans Within PlansLabel: Rock City Recording CompanyRelease date: April 3, 2012You won’t find any surprises on the ninth studio record from Bremerton’s favorite pop-punk sons, but you will find the band sounding renewed and more vital than they have in years. Perhaps this new energy stems from all the changes going on behind the scenes of late, namely that MxPx isn’t so much a fully-functioning band anymore. With longtime bandmates Tom Wisniewski and Yuri Ruley taking fulltime jobs at Bremerton’s shipyard, singer-songwriter Mike Herrera has been left to tour as the MxPx All-Stars, which doesn’t feature Wisniewski and Ruley, though the pair do play on Plans just as they have on all of the band’s releases over the last two decades.Perhaps this time away from each other has sparked a new found passion amongst the band, including the unusual arrangement of having one lineup that plays on the records and another that plays on the tours, which has allowed the band to keep pushing forward despite having only a single full-time member. On Plans, long gone are the endless love songs and Green Day aping that clogged their early albums, and in its place a more realized band who deftly merge their influences. The album is a 13-song collection of catchy, Costello-influenced pop-punk with the occasional hardcore breakdown or foray into power-pop territory. The album’s first single, “Far Away,” is a speedy, straightforward punk track with a big chorus that ought to leave longtime fans pleased as punk that the band’s schedule finally loosened up enough to allow them to get the album released.