STILL ‘SOMETHING TO WRITE HOME ABOUT’ AFTER 25 YEARS
ALBUM REVIEW | The Get Up Kids – Something To Write Home About: 25th Anniversary 5/5
Next year, Kansas City’s The Get Up Kids celebrate 30 years as a band. Over the past 3 decades they’ve had ups, downs, 2 hiatuses and 6 studio albums. Arguably their finest hour came 25 years ago when they released their sophomore album, 1999’s ‘Something To Write Home About’, an album that became an instant classic within the 90’s emo scene and remains a staple of the genre today.
Influenced by bands such as Jawbreaker and Sunny Day Real Estate, The Get Up Kids formed in 1995 with singer/guitarist Matt Pryor, lead guitarist Jim Suptic and bass player Rob Pope with Rob’s younger brother Ryan rounding out the line up a year later on drums. Dropping their first album in 1997, ‘Four Minute Mile’ is a typical – but excellent – 90s emo affair, all strained vocals and rough around the edges. The album garnered the band a lot of attention and they signed to then-fledgling label Vagrant Records in 1999. Their first of three releases with the label was ‘Something To Write Home About’, along with keyboardist Jason Dewees, which also helped to put Vagrant on the map, selling over 140,000 copies on it’s initial release.
To celebrate 25 years of the album, The Get Up Kids are releasing a new version via Polyvinyl and Smartpunk Records, featuring the remastered original album along with a bunch of demos from during the recording sessions.
There’s not much that can be said about ‘Something To Write Home About’ that hasn’t already been said at this stage. It’s an emo and pop punk classic with absolutely no skips from start to finish. ‘Holiday‘, ‘Ten Minutes‘ and ‘Action & Action‘ are still three of the most popular Get Up Kids songs to this day, and rightly so, but STWHA shines just as brightly in it’s deep cuts. Bangers such as ‘Red Letter Day’, ‘I’m A Loner Dottie, A Rebel’ and ‘The Company Dime’ sit comfortably alongside the more introspective songs like ‘Valentine, ‘My Apology’ and ‘Close To Home’. Additionally, ‘Out Of Reach’ and ‘I’ll Catch You’ remain staples of The Get Up Kids encores during their live shows to this day.
The bonus tracks will be of interest to long time fans but not likely to entice new listeners. That being said, there’s some great curiosities available here. Pretty much every track from the main album is represented in demo form (the one exception being ‘Action & Action’) along with demo versions of ‘One Year Later’ and ‘Central Standard Time’, songs that had their final versions on the Red Letter Day EP and B-sides collection, Eudora, respectively. Most interestingly, both ‘Holiday’ and ‘Valentine’ have very different lyrics to their final versions, similar to the alternate version of Green Day’s ‘Basket Case’ that was unearthed last year. For those that know these songs inside and out, it’s great to be able to hear many of these songs at earlier stages in their development as well as a few ‘what could have been’ versions. The vinyl comes as a double album but it’s a shame there’s not a single ‘vanilla disc’ version for those who just want the original album.
The Get Up Kids have never quite hit the same heights as their second album. In a bid to ditch the emo label in the early 2000s, they released ‘On A Wire’ in 2002, which found the band broadening their horizons with a more alternative rock approach. It’s an album that wasn’t well received at the time but has been reappraised over the years and also meant 2004’s ‘Guilt Show’ had a slight return to their emo sound. It wasn’t until 2019’s underrated ‘Problems’ that The Get Up Kids got close to a spiritual successor to their best received album.
Something To Write Home About is an absolutely essential album, whether you’re an ‘elder emo’, new to the scene all together (we all know it’s not just a phase) or just a fan of emotionally charged rock songs. The anniversary album is available to stream from 23rd August with the vinyl version releasing a little later in a variety of variants. The Get Up Kids are playing the album in full on their current US tour with plans to bring this to the UK a in the near future.
Get your limited copy of this classic album HERE!
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