The Get Up Kids dig Elvis

[johnfoyle]

God - I am so out of touch - I`ve never even heard of this crowd.

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http://www.rollingstone.com/news/newsar ... ?nid=19411

The Get Up Kids Are Alright

Kansas City quintet return to rock


The Get Up Kids' new album, Guilt Show, is something of an about-face for the Kansas City-bred quintet.
"We were like, 'We gotta get back to play some rock,'" explains singer and principal songwriter Matt Pryor. "The only real understanding going into making Guilt Show was that we wanted to make it loud. We all loved [2002's] On a Wire, but to play it live, we were struggling with the flow of the set. The songs were too mellow. There was just too much slow." After recording that album with producer Scott Litt, Pryor and his longtime bandmates -- bassist Rob Pope, guitarist Jim Suptic, keyboardist James Dewees and drummer Ryan Pope -- blew their recording budget in their own backyard. Partnering up with producer Ed Rose, the group bought a Eudora, Kansas, studio and christened it the Black Lodge. It was there, throughout much of 2003, that the Get Up Kids made what Matt calls their best album yet.

"I'm really, really proud of this one," he says. "We took everything that we learned over the last eight years and put it into one cohesive thought. Of course, our newest record is always my favorite. That's the idea when we make a record -- to have the new one make all the earlier ones obsolete."

Pryor sites the piano-laced, drum-stomping "Never Be Alone," a tune the band recently reworked as an iTunes exclusive, as his favorite. "It's the one song on our album that I haven't ever gotten sick of," he says. "I wrote that song in March of last year and I couldn't get it out of my head, so I did a demo of it right away."

"Holy Roman," which takes shots at the current administration, was influenced by Pryor's new role as a father; the twenty-six-year-old has a two-year-old daughter and another child on the way. "Ever since I've become a parent I've become way more aware of what's going on in the world and life outside of rock & roll," Pryor says. "'Holy Roman' is probably the most political thing I've ever written."

While the song's lyrics reveal a distain for George W. Bush, the music reveals a love for Elvis Costello. "You can listen to Elvis' Get Happy and think, 'These are just straight-up verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus, but they're still interesting,'" Pryor says. "And there's nothing contrived. Not that I'm not trying to compare our band to the Attractions, but we're also trying to make pop music that isn't boring."

With a March trek across North America, a spring tour of Japan and another U.S. tour in the early summer, the Get Up Kids will spend much of 2004 on the road -- something Pryor doesn't relish. "Going on the road fucking sucks for me," he says. "It's so hard to be away. I love the two hours that we're on stage, but the other twenty-two hours a day are fucking terrible. It's a cliche to say that having kids changes everything, but it really, really does."

And the Get Up Kids are in no hurry to sign up as a support act for a package tour. The band has opened for Green Day, who Pryor calls "the nicest guys ever," and Weezer, who he calls "dicks." "It very much rubbed me the wrong way," he says of the outing with Rivers Cuomo and Co. "So we we're like, 'Fuck it. We're just gonna blow your ass off the stage.' It really made us want to work harder."

JOHN D. LUERSSEN
(March 2, 2004)

[wehitandrun]

The Get Up Kids are a Vagrant band who're HUGE with underground "post punk" fanatics.

They have some decent releases.

I'm not a fan of the new cd. I downloaded it a few weeks ago. BOOO!




<3,
s.

[johnfoyle]

http://www.vh1.com/news/articles/148700 ... id_0.jhtml

( extract)

Get Up Kids frontman Matt Pryor is happily married and has an adorable 2-year-old daughter. Fortunately, he knows plenty of people who are still sad, desperate and dysfunctional.

"Elvis Costello once said that if you start having good relationships, you should write songs about other people's relationships, and that's exactly what I do," Pryor said. "The things that are exciting to me now are not necessarily exciting to your average 18-year-old."

[wehitandrun]

Haha, brilliant.

[tokyo vogue]

Their early stuff had a Christie Front Drive-esque charm, but that's just because they ripped them off. They also ripped Sunny Day Real Estate, but SDRE ripped off Fugazi, so, uh, that's a couple layers of unoriginality right there. The one EP is pretty good, though...the one with "Off the Wagon"? Yeah. Clearly, I am a fountain of information.


The new stuff is standard issue whine-pop. If you dig that sort of thing, great. If not...it's spork-to-eye time.



I recall there being a GUK side project called the New Amsterdams.

[wehitandrun]

Hah, tokyo, they didn't rip anybody off. Stop namedropping.

The New Amsterdams is a horrible side project by the vocalist. They have a good song- "Stay On The Phone", but otherwise it's not worth hearing.