The Get Up Kids, There Are Rules
By Chris Polley
Comeback albums beget introductory sentences in music reviews that inherently have to somehow imply that the band in question is attempting to relive their glory years. It’s unavoidable, no matter how much the musicians in said band may “just want to put out another record” or “just be a band again.” As sad as it may be in our cynical society, especially in the world of indie, a lapse in time represents much more than just the passage of years. It represents a cycle of loss, grief, hope, and rebirth. And even indie is still rooted in Westernized culture rife with Christ imagery, so you better believe that a reunion of some band that made me cry multiple times when I was an impressionable teenager is going to be judged way more unfairly than they’d like. And for that I can feel guilty, but I simply cannot apologize.
Put in most basic terms, The Get Up Kids were once purveyors of second-wave emo, meaning somewhere between Sunny Day Real Estate’s Diary and Fall Out Boy’s From Under the Cork Tree. Their debut full-length Four Minute Mile was as raw and arresting as it was whiny and undercooked. Yes, it was about breaking up with your college girlfriend, but it was also a vivid synthesis of pop-punk’s infectiousness and indie rock’s bold authenticity and determinism. Then came their sophomore masterpiece Something to Write Home About, previously discussed with far too much nostalgia and personal bias here. It had more unabashed balladry and pomp, but also showed the band maturing to its zenith, writing lyrics more universal and orchestrating instrumentation more focused. Two more albums came afterward (the acoustic-heavy On a Wire and the fizzy pop-centric Guilt Show) but neither captured the high point of popularity and fan rabidity of the aforementioned magnum opus.
In 2005, the band called it quits and its players experienced varied mid-career crises and/or successes. Singer/guitarist Matt Pryor oscillated between success and survival with his singer-songwriter solo work (under his proper name as well as The New Amsterdams), keyboardist/vocalist James Dewees became the go-to touring keyboardist for third-wave emo bottom-feeders (albeit very successful bottom-feeders) such as New Found Glory and My Chemical Romance, and bassist Rob Pope joined one of the most popular indie-rock bands of the decade: Spoon. Somehow, in the midst of all of this, they also managed to re-release Something to Write Home About and cull together a reunion tour, which got many fans chomping at the bit, not unlike the also-recent Sunny Day Real Estate tour, Cap’n Jazz reunion gigs in Chicago this summer, and the news from just last week that Braid is back in the studio recording demos. Well, TGUK beat all the others to actually following through on their own hype and have brought us There Are Rules, a curiously titled comeback that comes with it not only baggage but bragging rights.
They got here first, yes, but should they have waited it out a little more? Part of me says yes, because much of TAR sounds rushed upon initial listening, but another part of me says that’s perfectly acceptable. After all, in anticipation I’ve revisited their lesser later works from the early 00s and found the same kind of anxious frenzy that I fell in love with in their first two records when I was an adolescent in the late 90s. Perhaps I just needed to catch up age-wise to where they were when they made those records, I thought to myself as I started for the first time to dig the rustic tones of On a Wire and jubilant fuck-all-ness of Guilt Show. I don’t get There Are Rules right now, and I think that’s okay. They’re prepping me for the continual rash of rebirths and/or reunion-abortions that are inevitable in this day and age of capitalizing on nostalgia. Especially for such a derided subgenre of indie rock (yes, it didn’t start with mascara and the mall, trust me), the fact that the bands are finding welcome arms is amazing enough. Who’s not to say they should get cut some slack as they ease their way back in as experienced yet confused 30-somethings trying to regain their footing?
As you can see, I’m being quite forgiving, almost definitely because of residual diehard fanaticism, but also potentially because I hear so much potential in these songs, even as I can’t honestly and unequivocally sing their praises. Sonically, not much has changed for the band: there are driving guitars, there are nasally earnest vocals, and there are plenty of melodies alternating between aching and anthemic. As the name suggests, there are rules to the game they helped formulate, and they’re not going to deny their presence and importance. What they can do is just like they’ve always been careful of throughout their career, they can and have developed a tone here unto its own, giving the record a voice slightly apart from the rest of the band’s discography, but not so much so that it sounds like aging farts either a) trying to recapture their youthful glow or b) trying to wildly reinvent themselves for a new era.
No, instead we get a grown-up band very careful to add tinges of newness to the edges, including but not limited to gusty swings of distorted affectations on the already raspy vocals, spacey swirling yet mechanically guttural effects on the guitar, and richly stern low-end from both the keyboardist and bassist. Together it creates a can’t-quite-put-your-finger-on-it atmosphere that feels at once adventurous and unsure. Some tracks, such as “Automatic” and “Pararelevant” make it an engaging and exciting mix, largely because the sing-along quotient is high enough to make it sound natural, but others like “Rally ‘Round the Fool” and “Keith Case” fall flat and plodding. Over time these less immediately accessible tracks might click with the fanboy within, but really, I can’t be too sure how many new admirers Pryor and co. are going to win over with their return to the scene.
Really, though, that may be okay. I think anyone could have predicted they’d be met with ardent support upon their homecoming by those who spent years dedicated to belting out every chorus in a college dorm room, but also met with half-acknowledged passes by those who only know them for cultivating a style that led to some bad decisions in Spider-Man 3. A band cannot ignore their past death in favor for a new life devoid of all past trappings, and I think The Get Up Kids understand this. They’re conceding to the endurance of conventions and hard-and-fast tenets of the music industry and just trying one more go at the game without worrying about winning. They’re much more fascinated in the subtleties of the process and the derived enjoyment therein, which I can’t help but respect.
Plus, it sounds like they’re having fun doing it, and even if I only get a fraction of the enjoyment out of There Are Rules that I got out of Four Minute Mile or Something to Write Home About, I’m okay with that. I’ll keep listening to and discovering newer, younger, hipper bands, but it’s also peaceful to know that I’m not the only one that can’t let go of the past to the point of trying to bring it back into the present.