Band : The Get Up Kids
Album title : Simple Science
Label : Heroes & Villains – Hassle
Distributor : Suburban
Release date : 17/05/2010
Release : (4-track EP) CD

Returning with their first release of new material in some 6 years, The Get Up Kids are known as one of the most important bands from the ‘90s Emo scene. Formed in 1995 in Kansas City (Missouri) from the remains of highschool acts Kingpin and Secret Decoder Ring, the band developed a style which would influence contemporary bands as well as later Emo acts such as Fall Out Boys, Midtown, Hellogoodbye ad many ohers city the Missouri Five as their main musical influence. History has it recorded that Blink-182 bassist Mark Hoppus proposed to his wife to the TGUK song “I’ll Catch You”. Still, members of TGUK are known to dislike the “honour” of being seen as the prototypical Emo act. Guitarist Jim Suptic even apologized for having the influence the band did on many contemporary Third-Wave Emo bands, stating that “…the Punk scene we came out of and the Punk scene now are completely different. It’s like Glam Rock now…If this is the world we hellped create, then I apologize!”

Between 1997 and 2004, TGUK offered us 4 studio albums: 1997’s Four Minute Mile, 1999’s breakthrough album Something To Write Home About (for which they toured non-stop for 3 years), the 2002 album On A Wire, and finally 2004’s Guilt Show (plus a number of EPs which occasionally featured exclusive tracks). They also erected their own imprint Heroes & Villans, as a subsiduary of Vagrant Records, originally to release albums of their own, later also to help other upcoming bands. As a sign of the band members’ “togetherness”, it can be noted that the band hardly went through line-up changes: with Matt Pryor (lead vocals/ rhythm guitar), Jim Suptic (lead guitar/ backing vocals) and Rob Pope (bass) as the three original members, Ryan Pope (drums) joined in 1996, and Coalesce’s drummer James Dewees completed the band in 1999, adding keyboards (and backing vocals) to the band’s music (his joining came after the Pope brothers were invited to contribute to the first solo album by Dewees under the Reggie And The Full Effect monicker). However, as so often happens when youngsters have been together for a long time, tensions began to build during the writing process of their last album. Suptic was on a honeymoon, Dewees recovering from a difficult divorce and pouring the creative outburst from that in a new RATFE album Songs Not To Get Married To. It left the band with only 3 members to compose the new songs, and it was therefore less of an collective outing. By the time the album was released, Emo’s “Third Wave” was in full blast, and TGUK were somewhat overshadowed by that. They were invited by “new kids on the block” Dashboard Confessional as a support on their Honda Civic Tour, but with Pryor a fresh father of a darling daughter, his heart was really at home, and he became standoffish. The tour with Dashboard finished, TGUK started off on their own world tour, and now tensionss in the band réally started to build, following Pryor’s refusal to sing at several occasions. Once back home, the band went on an onofficial hiatus, returning to the live front only in January 2005 to play a show at the Granada Theater in Lawrence, Kansas to celebrate the band’s 10th anniversary. The show was recorded and released next May as the band’s first live album, but before that, on March 8, the band had announced calling it quits.

The band split up, its members would occupy their time in various ways. The Pope brothers had, on the occasion of the recordings of the Guilt Show album, started the Black Lodge Studios with producer Ed Rose, and that’s where they put most of their efforts into, as well as playing the occasional show with Koulfax. Pryor continued as part of the New Amsterdams, an acoustic Alt-Country band he’d started in 2000. In 2007 he started the children’s band The Terrible Twos, who would go on to release 2 albums on Vagrant, and in 2008 he released his debut solo album Confident Man. Suptic went on to form Blackpool Lights, who released their first album This Town’s Disaster on the Curb Appeal Records imprint (also released albums by The New Amsterdams and Smoking Popes) which he co-founded. Dewees first toured as the keyboardist of New Found Glory, then toured with Reggie And The Full Effect as support of Hellogoodbye in 2006, and joined My Chemical Romance as their touring keyboardist on their 2008 world tour. Coming home he completed the 5th RATFE album, following its release with a brief US tour.

During that tour, Dewees reports were pouring in that he was hinting at a TGUK reunion tour to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the band’s sophomore album. The reunion was eventually confirmed, and the band played their first reunion show at kansas City’s The Record Bar on Nov. 16, 2008, and at the same time it was confirmed that a re-issue of said album (including a code to download bonus demo tracks from the original recording of the album from the Vagrant website, plus a DVD with a band retrospective and other material, and a recent live performance) was to arrive in 2009, followed by a world tour in support of it. In August, they toured Europe, and during Summer they posted pictures of the band in a studio on their website, fueling speculation that a new album might be coming along. In an interview with a webzine Pryor then confirmed that already 9 songs were recorded, and that the band would return to the studio to record another 12 tracks to be released on three 7-track EPs, most likely on 12-inch vinyl.

Well, it’s nót a 7-tracker, but the Simple Science EP is not only being released in the digitalised version, but also coming out on a limited 10-inch EP! With a duration of just over 16 minutes, I guess that was the minimum requirement. And this is where I need you to sit quietly in your chair, because I have to announce I never heard any music by this band before! But, goin’ on what I hear in these 4 new songs, I’m definitely gonna check out the band’s older material when I get a chance to it. At any rate, I’ll be looking forward to future releases. As all four songs are posted at myspace.com/thegetupkids, I can generalise things by stating that the songs all bring a mixture of calmer and more (tempered) aggressive music, infusing plenty of atmospheric moments with a nice layered quality. A quality unheard of in modern Emo bands, that’s for sure! Yeah, TGUK may apologize for having been so influencial to modern day Emo bands, but if there’s something they should néver apologize for, it’s their own music! Great EP!

92/100

Tony.