The Get Up Kids
Something To Write Home About

Listening to it for the first time, perhaps absentmindedly, one might get the impression of facing pseudo Blink 182 or, worse still, a faster and distorted version of some horrible boy band. Nothing could be further from the truth, as when you listen closely, you find what the Get Up Kids offered with what remains the quintessential Emo record.

"Something to Write Home About" tells stories of awkward teenagers, of those who were dumped by their girlfriends, of holidays and homecomings, of letters and messages never written or sent. But what matters most is how they tell it: not forgetful of the lesson from the ultimate "awkward teenagers," the Replacements, but with perhaps even more flair, the Get Up combine punk energy and some references to 1980s American Rock with the melancholic pop of the most oblique and less defined English New Wave, like the Smiths and especially the Cure, from which the Get Up, unsurprisingly, revisit "Close to Me" (absolutely a must-hear in their version!).

And they mix it all with remarkable and rare intelligence, which they particularly demonstrate in structuring and arranging the songs, never banal or derivative, but always elusive and hard to define, dominated by constant dynamic changes ("Holiday," "Action & Action"), forceful and distorted yet always softened by the sweetness of the keyboard ("Close to Home," "Red Letter Day"), unusual and ever-changing in structure ("Company Dime," "I'm a Loner Dottie, a Rebel"), or simply melancholic and subdued, without appearing less inventive ("Valentine," "Out of Reach").

And it is above all the expressive freedom of the individual musicians, whose interpretation is always airy and little stylized, that makes each piece always interesting and originally constructed, making "Something to Write..." a little gem of 90s American alternative. The only regret is that the Get Up Kids never went beyond this remarkable second album, closing and stereotyping their style instead of expanding it, resulting in at least a mediocre record like the subsequent "On a Wire."