Labels: Vagrant
Review by: Andy Malcolm
It’s the Get Up Kids everybody!! Ha ha, I can’t believe we got sent a Get Up Kids CD for review. I am totally going to have to give this to my buddy Simon tonight. Anyway, this is 13 songs (IN 45 MINUTES! CHRIST!) of pop music that is, essentially, shite. Elton John piano, bland middle of the road riffs on the mid-paced songs, boring vocals (these guys were so much better when they couldn’t sing), wanky guitar parts, irritating backups… The list goes on. These guys just got so old. It surprises me when people who’s roots were in the punk scene (ok, ok, no matter how tenuous but tGUK at one stage were definitely a part of it) can grow up to make such a boring record. Or maybe it doesn’t. I don’t know. I am rambling.
The best song on here is the happy and catchy “Wouldn’t Believe It” which sounds like a song that didn’t quite make it on to “Very Emergency”, mostly because Davey isn’t singing it. Bouncy, bouncy, bouncy. The singer dude even does one of those old tGUK still whiney vocal bits for one zillionth of a second, argh, do that all the time you old crumbly! That said, they still ruin it with the lounge style outro into more poncing piano drudgery.
Any way you look at this (with a telescope, preferably), this is balls. It’s tragic even. A mix of piano led songs that are about one millionth as good as Ben Folds Five, and empty faster stuff. To top it all they haven’t even re-recorded “I’m A Loner Dottie, A Rebel” so as to show us the perfect timeline as to how this band has successfully declined in to their present day stink-bad. A sorry state affairs for the “GOD FATHERS OF EMO” indeed. If only they had been “THE KING HERROD OF EMO”.
how to know you’ve been watching too much futurama: there is a lyric that goes “dark night of the soul” which i initially heard as “dark matter of the soul”.