Wednesday, May 6, 2009

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Under Cover: The Get Up Kids collection, Part II

Posted: 06 May 2009 02:38 PM PDT

Welcome back readers!  Last week I informed you that I was dedicating my feature to the incredible Get Up Kids because I could not contain my excitement at seeing them play a reunion show at the Blender Theatre in New York City.  Well, the show was amazing, the set was chock full of old and new favorites, and the crowd was left wanting more.  I’m still intent on sharing cover rarities from their Eudora (2001) album and have a few more choice ones for your listening pleasure.  While I continue riding the second wave emo goodness, feel free to enjoy Under Cover: The Get Up Kids collection, Part II.getupkids
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."Regret" cover (original: )
Mama always said “Beware of kids who don't like The Get Up Kids.”  Okay, fine she didn't really say that, but I've learned that anyone who loves the GUK as much is usually a person worth knowing (and loving).  Apart from soundtracking my entire college career, their seminal emo-meets-indie sound borrows heavily from 80s downer pioneers and front runners, such as .  Paying homage on their compilation record Eudora (get this, it rocks), the GUK put out their own version complete with their signature style: knob-twisting, whiny vocals and background yelps, keyboards, ambitious guitar, and they close out their track with this upbeat synth I can't get enough of.  This track is a must for your collection if you dig the GUK, , covers, or just great music.
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."Alec Eiffel" cover (original: Pixies)
Raw, loud, unrefined, energetic, raucous, and any other word that properly captures the magic of this Pixies song will apply.  One of my favorites of their incredible Trompe le Monde, it seems the Get Up Kids love this Pixies song almost as much as I do.  They totally nailed all the intricate guitar riffs and the cover definitely earned its spot on ’ tribute album Where Is My Mind? This track makes me want to spin around the room and mouth the ever-cryptic lyrics (are they lauding the Eiffel tower, or making fun of it?  The jury is still out on this one) until I get dizzy.  I love all the background vocals and how they fill out the chorus, adding more depth to the song.  Not only did they do justice, but they created one of their most memorable cover tracks to date.

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."Impossible Outcomes" cover (original: Metroschifter)
“Our eyes, hearts, words are evidence!” If you asked me four years ago about a Get Up Kids reunion tour, I would certainly have thought it would be the most impossible of all “Impossible Outcomes.”  This Metroschifter cover is actually one of my favorite GUK songs and sadly I’ve never heard it played live at any of the handful of shows I’ve been to in the last seven to eight years.  I even screamed at the reunion show for them to play this song and singer actually said into the mic “What?” while smiling, but didn’t really acknowledge the request.  He said they had a pretty tight set list, unfortunately.  I’m not sure if it’s the strained vocals, the tempo, the keyboards, but when they come together with lyrics that tug at the heartstrings (“My dreams aren’t premonitions because I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming of… impossible, impossible outcomes!”), it’s pure emo magic.   And whenever they sing the part that goes “But in her eyes I can see it all, short plaid skirt, white short short-sleeve shirt,” I always secretly wish they are referring to me.
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The Get Up Kids: website | myspace

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Interview With: The Thermals

Posted: 06 May 2009 12:58 PM PDT

I had never seen the Portland, Oregon band before, but when I wandered backstage at the historic Slowdown in Omaha, and some guy with long, dark hair and a tight black shirt over a mildly plump stomach tried to introduce himself as singer , I was skeptical. I glanced at the others in the green room and bassist shook her head, curls bouncing. Finally, the guy laughed and admitted the truth–he was not Hutch. A bewildered Hutch emerged from a door behind me, unaware of the prank that was just played as the rest of the room joined in the laughter. This was my first experience of the band and I think it is a very true representation of their characters. Laid-back people who can find fun in almost anything whether it is death or a harmless prank. Check out the interview below:

, : Our last interview was with a preacher.
Bethany, PopWreckoning: With a preacher? Really? Like a church preacher? What sort of interview was that?
HH: Really, yeah. We were just talking about the lyrics of the last record and some of the new songs. It was cool. It wasn’t confrontational. They just really wanted to talk about the lyrics. It was for this podcast called “The World’s Most Dangerous Bible Study”, but it was one of the more interesting ones that we’ve done.
PW: Cool. But this last record was a bit more political than religious, right?
HH: The new one?
PW: Yeah. The 2006 was a bit more religious than this one.
HH: Well, there’s not so much, well there’s a little politics in it, but I don’t think it is the main theme or anything. the-thermals-1

PW: Yeah, it’s not one of the main motifs. I read somewhere that the title track “Now We Can See” was a political song at least because you guys started in 2002 and have been a band through the entire Bush administration.
HH: I know! Oh God. It was horrible.
PW: But now there is a new President.
HH: Yeah.
PW: There’s a lot of ironic stuff in that song. With what we “should” be doing.
HH: Definitely.

PW: How do you think Obama is doing?
HH: I think he’s doing good. He is doing good so far, but it hasn’t been — it seems like every time there has been a President, within the first hundred days there isn’t too much that has really happened. It was the same for Bush. It’s cool.
I think a lot of people feel positive. Obama seems cool and really smart and realistic, you know? What do you [Foster] think?
, : Yeah, well he is already helping out people and jumped on that right away and he’s being doing a lot of good things. Yeah, it was just kind of weird timing that this record came out around the same time as Obama. It wasn’t like we had planned it or knew who was going to get elected.

PW: So what are some of the themes?
HH: Death.
PW: Ha, well you have a quote about what it was that I thought was interesting. What was that?
HH: Something about air, land and water? Death?
PW: I’ll remember it. Well, yeah, there is a lot about death, but it is also a very upbeat record.
HH: Totally.
PW: Oh, yeah, I remember the quote now. It was one of the song titles. You said this album is “songs from when we were alive”.
HH: Yeah. “Songs from When We Were Alive”. It’s the same themes that we have on a lot of records: the arrogance of people and just the violent arrogant history of humanity. A lot of songs, there are many songs told from the point of death, but through death, they’re all songs about light. It’s not, I don’t think it is…well, some lyrics are dark, but we don’t really think of it that way. We think of it more as a fun, upbeat record, but if you actually read the lyrics, it is a little dark.
PW: Just a little?
HH: Haha, well, we’re singing about death, but a lot of times it is with a real sarcastic attitude. Or it is just…
PW: You do have some rather creative ways for people to die.
HH: Totally.
PW: You’ve got death by psychosis and…
HH: Totally. Drug overdose. Drowning. Lots of water on this record. We went to the coast and wrote a lot. Kathy and I took a couple trips to the Oregon coast. And of course it rains all the time in Portland, so we got a lot of water. But it’s just like what I think are a lot of classic songwriting themes, which is death, love, water and land.

Enter drummer Westin Glass.

Westin Glass, : What’s going on here?
HH: This is Westin; they’re from PopWreckoning.
PW: So you just made a music video for the title song, “Now We Can See”.
HH: Yeah. It’s out now. Pitchfork has it. It’s on Kill Rock Stars and it is on our Thermals YouTube page. It’s with , who did our first video. He has done so many videos like Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs and Black Keys. He did the Pavement documentary. He’s done a million things.

PW: What is it like to work with him?
HH: He is great.
PW: Does he come up with the ideas then and you go with it or is it more collaborative?
HH: No, there’s always a million ideas that people have that are really complicated and make us look like asses, so we just, well I just said, “We’re just going to play in our studio. And it will be really simple. We don’t need to set up with the public and we won’t need days of shooting. Just come and film us.” So it was real kind of basic: just the band playing.
We covered our studio with posters of and filmed in this other room in the studio we we projected our cats and other stuff in Portland and stuff like that over us. Working with Lance is great. He’s really positive and anything you want to do, he is down to do. And he works really fast. It only took like four hours or something to make the video. I don’t like spending days making a video. Videos are cool, but really, I’d rather be writing songs. You know, playing, rather than spending hours editing.

PW: On this new album, you describe your sound as post-power-pop. What exactly is that?
HH: Yeah, that was just for the press release though. Haha.
PW: Yeah, you kind of made up that genre, right?
HH: Yeah, it’s not post-power-pop in any way. It is like a power-pop. It is totally a power-pop record, I think. There’s a lot of big chords and big melodies and big drums. I think it is really melodic and catchy. So yeah, all our press material that I wr-I write it all. It’s all really snotty and very snippy and taking a piss at them. Most bands’ press kits, I think are really dull. They either kiss a band’s ass way too much or are just dull.
PW: Yeah, they all try to claim best band since Jesus.
HH: Yeah. Just whatever stupid shit. When we were at SubPop, I read a stack, they just gave me a stack of band’s one-sheets and I was like I’m going to just start writing these for us because I can make it funnier and more interesting than just like, “Here’s this band called and they’re new album is blah blah.”

PW: Do you write other stuff for the band, too, like the Wikipedia page?
HH: Yeah, yeah. I write all the stuff for the band. It’s always like, well the iTunes bio, we’ll see what iTunes lets me get away with. Someone is going to edit it.
PW: Yeah, they can be conservative.
HH: Yeah, they’ll make it boring. But I write all that stuff, so then it fits with the attitude and set up with the band, which is basically snotty and sarcastic and full of it.

PW: You mentioned SubPop. How was the switch to Kill Rock Stars and why did you do it?
KF: We had a contract with SubPop for three records and that was up, so they gave us another one and we just wanted a contract that was one record at a time and we wanted the licenses. We didn’t want the label to own the masters. So we just decided to not work with SubPop just based on that. Hutch and I made the record and we didn’t have a label behind it. Kill Rock Stars just approached us first out of any label and they just kept in touch with us and were really aggressively excited about working with us.
PW: And they have a convenient location, too. They just moved to Portland with you guys, right?
HH: Yeah.
KF: Yeah, they moved last summer from Olympia. So great town, great vibe, so that was a big selling point, too. They were a really supportive label. And I kind of see Kill Rock Stars like how I see SubPop as kind of an iconic indie label that I grew up with. I’ve seen a lot of their releases and was excited they wanted to work with us.
HH: Yeah, they’re great. We love them so much. We loved SubPop, too. I was proud to be on SubPop, but now I’m proud to be on Kill Rock Stars.
PW: Definitely. They’re both great labels.
HH: Yeah. SubPop was massive for me when we signed to them. That was a dream. We learned so much in the five years we were on that we could be like, we’ve been on SubPop and it is OK to not be SubPop. We just wanted more control over our recordings and we decided in our heads what we wanted the contract to look and we waited to see who would give that to us. It was going to be just one record, so that we wouldn’t owe the label anything if it doesn’t go well or things go bads. Then we’d own it and we had the money to finish a record, so we finished it. We just made the whole thing and delivered a finished record to Kill Rock Stars. the-thermals-2

PW: This question is for you, Westin. What was it like coming into the band after they had already done all this music and trying to add your own individuality to it?
WG: Well, simultaneously the most awesome thing ever, but also pretty intimidating and scary. But, these guys aren’t intimidating people at all in general.
HH: What? Haha.
WG: It was an incredible stroke of good fortune for me. I mean as for adding my own whatever, I try not to as much as possible because I feel like they’re already perfect.

PW: Good compliment. Alright back to you guys [Harris and Foster], since you are in Omaha and I have to ask, I heard–I think from the twitter today actually–but you too brought the first concert ever to Portland.
HH: Yeah! So cool! It was Conor Oberst, and Ian [McElroy], his cousin, and Roger [Lewis], who is downstairs. They rolled up in a little Corolla or something. It was just the three of them in this tiny car with Roger sitting in the back next to the kick drums in the seat. , you know that band? They were friends with . I think Letting Out the Happiness had just come out, but my friend Marc [Bianchi] in was like, “Hey, there’s this band called that is going out on tour and can you help them find a show?” And we were like, “Sure.” It may have been a couple months before Fevers and Mirrors came out. So we put on this house show and it was so good and they were so rad.

PW: Was it at your house?
HH: No, no, I don’t remember whose house it was actually.
KF: It was at this girl’s house that kept freaking out about how loud it was.
HH: It was loud! It was so rad and so good.
KF: It was this really nice house and there were only 10-15 people there, so it was a small show. I just remember her just freaking out.
HH: We were there just listening and thinking it is just three on the set, but then Roger would just bang on the drums. And everyone just went “Oh my God” because it started out acoustic then Roger just started smashing the hell out of those drums. It was cool. Then all of a sudden we knew Omaha. They brought like whatever Faint record had just come out. They came in to Kathy’s house and was like, “You have to hear this record, this record is so good.” I don’t think it was the first record. Blank-Wave Arcade? Is that the one?
PW: Yeah, that could be right. Fasciination was the most recent one, but there’s also Wet From Birth, Blank-Wave, Danse Macabre.
HH: This was almost ten years ago. I’m almost sure it was ‘99.
WG: I bet if you asked around Portland today, it will sound more like there were 300 people there, not ten.
HH: Yeah, totally. Every one’s like, “Yeah, I was there.” But we were. And we’ve always kept in touch, but then we toured with Cursive and then we’d always see The Good Life and when they came through our town. We’ve really been in touch with all the Omaha bands. Then the Faint came and stayed at my house and Azure Ray came. A couple times after that came and stayed at this old house that Kathy and I lived at. There are all these different people that we knew that we started playing with. So when we toured with Cursive, Tim [Kasher] was like, “Oh yeah, I stayed at your house four years ago when I was with .”
KF: They’re just all super sweet. played Portland just a few years ago and Conor was talking about us putting on his first show.
HH: Yeah. Everyone from Omaha is generally rad.
PW: Yeah, it’s a good town. I like it.
HH: Yeah.

PW: OK, well speaking of cities and scenes, I usually like to ask a question about up and coming bands in a city’s scene, but since you are from Portland and a lot of people already talk about the music from there, how about something different? If somebody were to go to Portland for the first time, what local coffee shops or restaurants would you recommend?
KF: Stumptown Coffee is like the coffee giant of Portland. It is just like this independent company that started like 10 to 12 years ago with just one coffee shop in the street and now it is all over town with like three or four coffee companies on a street. But Stumptown is expanding to other towns like Seattle, San Francisco and New York. Portland is just well known for Stumptown Coffee.
HH: Yeah, really good.
KF: And I love coffee and there are a lot of coffee snobs in Portland. There are a lot of restaurants in Portland, too. Lots of good food: cafes and restaurants.
WG: And food carts!
KF: Food carts are really big.
WG: Like any kind of food you can imagine, you can get it from a cart somewhere.
PW: Just street vendors?
KF: They’re like little trailers. People have a little kitchen inside and you just walk up to a window and get what you want.
PW: OK. I’ve never been to Portland, so if I go…
WG: You got to go.
KF: Yeah, they look like little trailers. Downtown, there are whole sections of them: Mexican, Thai, Vietnamese and now it is spreading all over town. Right by my house is a waffle cart and they call them “Dutch tacos” where they make your waffle and fold it in half and wrap it so you can just eat it and walk. They have it with sausage and maple spread and cheese.
WG: And it’s sooo good.
KF: There’s this other one called Junior Ambassadors and there’s this guy who makes soup and ice cream sandwiches. Portland is well-known for organic ingredients, too, all natural. So there’s a lot of good food and there’s all different kinds.

PW: You [Glass] just moved to Portland, so what’s the coolest thing you’ve discovered since moving there?
WG: Waffle cart is up there. It is walking distance from my house, so it’s just every single day I think about going there. I mean, I don’t go there every day, but it is so good. If you had it, you would understand. The one I get there is maple spread and pecans. They just wrap it and it is so good. So what else? I go to Stumptown a lot. My roommate works at Stumptown. Too bad about Red Wing. It was a place right next to our practice space that was like a coffee shop cafe, but it is going out of business. It’s really sad.
PW: Well cool. We can call it quits, so you can get down to the stage so Shaky Hands can dedicate their set to you as promised.

: website | myspace

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Jenny Owen Youngs with Jukebox the Ghost stop by Johnny Brenda’s on national tour

Posted: 06 May 2009 09:39 AM PDT

If you’re as of yet unfamiliar with a Popwreckoning favorite by the name of Ms. Jenny Owen Youngs, you should hit up a stop on her 30-day tour with Jukebox The Ghost, which began last week. As a staple of the Hotel Cafe Tour, you’re sure to fall in love with J.O.Y. if you’re a fan of Ingrid Michaelson, Greg Laswell, Cary Brothers, and Anya Marina.

jennyowenyoungs

Youngs’ latest release, Transmitter Failure, drops May 26th on Nettwerk. She gave a hint of what to expect with her previously Led To The Sea EP and again we’d like to give you a taste with the title track from that EP and the second track on the new record:

Jenny Owen Youngs - “Led to the Sea”

You’re in for a treat to catch Youngs on stage — she sings beautifully and talks like a sailor. It’s absolutely delightful on so many levels. Head to the Philadelphia show at fabulous Johnny Brenda’s to catch EIC Jessica. Sure to be a fun show as it’s a sort of homecoming for headliners Jukebox the Ghost. Hope to see you there!

Tour Dates:
May 06 - Doug Fir Lounge / Portland
May 08 -  Bottom of the Hill / San Francisco
May 09 - The Hotel Café / Los Angeles
May 10 - The Loft- UCSD / San Diego
May 12 - Club Congress / Tucson
May 14 - Stubb's BBQ Indoors / Austin
May 15 - The Prophet Bar / Dallas
May 16 - Juanita's Cantina Ballroom / Little Rock
May 17 - Hi-Tone Café / Memphis
May 19 - 3rd and Lindsley / Nashville
May 20 - The Casbah@ Tremont Music Hall / Charlotte
May 21 - Cat's Cradle / Carrboro, NC
May 22 - Canal Club Downstairs Lounge / Richmond, Va.
May 23 - Rock and Roll Hotel / Washington DC
May 26 - Johnny and Brenda's / Philadelphia
May 27 - Bowery Ballroom / New York City
May 28 - Café 939 / Boston
May 29 - Empire Dine and Dance / Portland
May 30 - Toquet Hall / Westport, Ct.

Jenny Owen Youngs: website | myspace

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Win a copy of all-star band Moonalice’s debut album!

Posted: 06 May 2009 08:06 AM PDT

Bay Area supergroup Moonalice, comprised of (”Saturday Night Live”, Hall & Oates, Bob Dylan), Barry Sless (David Nelson Band, Phil Lesh & Friends),  Pete Sears (Rod Stewart, Jefferson Starship) and more, just last month released their debut album, Produced by the legendary T Bone Burnett, using his innovative new XOΔE (audio-enhanced) mastering technology, on A Minor Label Records and we have 5 copies to give away!

moonalice-cd

Moonalice was also become the first band to tweet concert music downloads in real time. Always at the forefront of the latest digital developments, Moonalice posted their CD release show and party on April 3rd at Slim's in San Francisco, and later followed up by posting all songs from their concert April 30th live at Sullivan Hall in New York City.  Immediately following each song during that show, Moonalice's sound team took a song’s audio, digitized it, uploaded it and tweeted about its availability — all before the group finished playing the very next song. They are the first artists to broadcast a concert in real time on the Twitter platform. Neat!

To win one of five copies of Moonalice’s self-titled debut: tweet this post and comment with the link! Winners will be drawn next week!
(Open to US and Canadian residents only — sorry foreign readers!)

Moonalice: website | myspace | twitter

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Interview With: Ayad Al Adhamy of Passion Pit

Posted: 06 May 2009 07:45 AM PDT

As a late Valentine’s Day present for his girlfriend at the time, 21-year-old Michael Angelakos made for her what would soon be released as the Chunk Of Change EP. The E.P. eventually got a wide-release on the record label French Kiss, and, with Pitchfork and the blogosphere’s support, has led to Passion Pit’s debut full-length, Manners, being one of the most highly anticipated albums of 2009. Though began simply as Angelakos + laptop, it is currently a five-person touring band which includes Ayad Al Adhamy, the interview victim of the day.

Marc Z. Grub, PopWreckoning: So, Ayad, you are a member of . passion-pit-2
Ayad Al Adhamy, : True.
PW: And what do you play?
AA: I play keyboards and samplers.
PW: So, I think, I'm gonna say it, I'm calling it, breakout band 2009: .
AA: Nice.
PW: I'm calling it, you guys are this year's .
AA: That's pretty damn good, I'm very pleased that that happened.

PW: So how did you get to be a member of ?
AA: I knew Ian [Hultquist] pretty well from classes [at Berkley], and my roommate also grew up with Mike [Angelakos], so I kind of new that group in like a roundabout way. And I was getting through a phase with stopping playing guitar because I was over my thrash metal days and started doing synthesizer stuff. I was like, "yeah, I just got a new synthesizer," to Ian and he's like, "oh, I just started jamming with these guys and we need one more synthesizer player!" I'm like, "I'll come jam with you guys!" So I went and I met up with them in like June 2007. And we started then and that's how I kind of got myself into it.

PW: So, I'm under the impression that Michael made the Chunk of Change EP on his own, is that true?
AA: Yeah, that's right. He made it, I guess it would have been February 2007. Or like January. Around then, even 2006. He played a show April 2007 and that's when Ian approached him and it took him a few months of coercing [Michael] to play the stuff live instead of just on a laptop. And the first practices were in June and August.

PW: Are you on the new album, Manners?
AA: It was mostly Mike and Nate [Donmoyer], because Nate was playing drums. I was in my last semester of college so I couldn't do too much. But Ian plays guitar a lot on it and Jeff plays bass and stuff. But Mike still writes all the songs.

PW: How does it feel to be in a blogger buzz band?
AA: It's a good thing and a bad thing at once. But you know, like hype is good but its also bad but I kind of take it as I go and just do like practice and stuff and try not to think about that stuff too much.

PW: Is this the first time you've been with a touring band?
AA: Yeah, this is the first time I've done that. I actually had no aspirations to do that for a while, I wanted to just like study programming and stuff. [When I was asked to join ] I was like, "Oh, I'll just join a band." I moved to America about five years ago and I haven't been in a band since I've been here so I joined these guys.

PW: Where did you move from?
AA: The Middle East, but I grew up in England as well. I'm the foreigner of the group for the most part, even though I sound American.
PW: How long were you in England?
AA: Ten years, about that, but it was my younger years. When I go back I get more English and if I hang out with English people, I get more English. If I hang out with Americans, I become very American.
PW: Right, because you have no accent.
AA: Yeah, it's a pretty weird thing.

PW: How are you liking the fans?
AA: Yeah, I really like it. At first it's very odd because you're like, "wow, you people remember us as ." I think Jeff [Apruzzese] gets recognized the most because he has very distinguishable features. And I know Ian gets upset like, "Aww, I never get recognized, no one ever notices me, but I'm a keyboard player!" It's a pretty funny situation. I don't know how to handle it yet but you know, I'm getting used to it.

PW: So Michael broke up with the girl he wrote Chunk of Change for, right?
AA: Uh, yeah, but I think that was a very mutual breakup. They were dating for a while but they're still very good friends.
PW: When I was listening to that EP I was thinking like, "Wow, this guy's got a really great relationship."
AA: Oh, really? Aren't the lyrics kind of smite?
PW: No, isn't he like saying how she's like the greatest girl ever at some point? [Note: the line I'm referring to is "oh yeah you're the best damn friend that I've ever had" in "Smile Upon Me"]
AA: Oh yeah, that's true. I definitely know that Mike kind of wrote the EP as a kind of like, "Hey Christine, I'm sorry I'm late with every type of present and I fuck up a lot, here's a present for Valentine's day…a month late…"
PW: I was under the impression that he was an awesome boyfriend and he was so good that he made this girl this EP that I actually felt threatened by it. Like, "Wow, this guy's the greatest boyfriend ever!"
AA: [It was more] like, "Yeah, I wrote it because I'm always late, and I'm a bad boyfriend, like, here's an EP."
PW: Great, now the world will know that Mike was not as great a boyfriend as we were under the impression that he was.
AA: That's pretty funny. It's all good humor though. passion-pit

PW: And - back to the music - does Michael just say like, "Play this," and you play it? Or do you have your own contributions or do you say, "Maybe if we do it like this…?"
AA: Actually, that's pretty much what we like doing. We sit around for a while and figure out how we're going to play it. Translating like a guitar-rock album is pretty easy, because you play that on guitar. When you have like 100 layers of different synthesizers from the 60's to modern era, you're like, "OK, I only have two keyboards, how are we gonna make this sound good?" So it ends up being this crafting where we're trying to get the sound of the record but like whenever I play a lead line, it's different than on the record because it's like how I would play it slightly differently [from Michael]. Some songs we've just changed completely like, "Live To Tell The Tale." Where on the record it's very slow, live we have like three different versions. As with "Better Things." Like there's like four different versions live. We're pretty good with like sitting around and experimenting.

's debut album, Manners, drops May 19th on French Kiss.

: website | myspace

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The Get Up Kids with Brand New @ Blender Theater, NYC

Posted: 06 May 2009 06:45 AM PDT

The Get Up Kids, one of my favorite indie rock meets second wave emo bands, killed it at a reunion show at the Blender Theatre to a crowd that seemed quick to forgive the fact that they broke up in 2005, leaving us all broken-hearted, confused, and unwilling to accept the reality.  There was an “unconfirmed opener” that the secretive venue people claimed was some band called “Matzah Balls,” and even the PR rep at Vagrant Records refused to tell me who it would be.

We sensed the phony band name only hid an inevitably great surprise. Rumors swirled about it being Face to Face (or any comparable punk band in town for the next day’s Bamboozle Festival), but it ended up being Brand New! Everyone went nuts for them, as we grew even hungrier for The Get Up Kids to take the stage. They were greeted with the loudest screams I’ve heard in a while.

Playing a mix of old and new, it was a great show for old and new fans alike, since I’m fairly certain any type of fan probably went home happy to hear at least one of their favorite songs. They were admittedly rusty but no one seemed to care or notice. You could tell their hardcore fans were in the house since not only did everyone know every word to every song, but they insisted on singing along almost as loudly as the band. In fact, lead singer Matt Pryor stopped every now and then to let the audience finish a song or belt out a chorus.

There was crowd surfing and a pseudo pit to my right that slightly irritated me (either because it truly was annoying or I was annoyed with myself and the pending fact that I may be “getting too old for this.” I’m embarrassed to admit the latter is probably more likely.) Honestly, none of that even mattered because I was so happy to be there. It was an incredible night and lead to lots of post-show gushing about G.U.K. with equally obsessed friends.  Their set rekindled my love for this band and I’ve been listening to Something To Write Home About non-stop ever since. Oh, and I’m proud to say that I’ll never outgrow or be too old for The Get Up Kids.

Set List:
Coming Clean
Action and Action
The One You Want
Valentine
Holiday
Woodson
Never Be Alone
Red Letter Day
Up On The Roof
Campfire Kansas
Holy Roman
Mass Pike
No Love
I’m A Loner Dottie, A Rebel
I’ll Catch You
//
Close To Me
Don’t Hate Me
Ten Minutes
Walking On A Wire

The Get-Up Kids: website | myspace

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Happy birthday!!

Posted: 06 May 2009 05:15 AM PDT

Happy birthday to two of our fabulous contributors, Dese’Rae Stage and Molly Thurin!

And a happy Seso de Mayo to you all.

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at 7:14 PM