The Get Up Kids: Something to Write Home About (25th Anniversary Deluxe Edition) album review

The album’s original 1999 recordings, remastered for this reissue, still sound unique and prophetic of the future shape of emo. Pryor’s lyrics embody how teenage relationships can feel simultaneously vast and trivial: Summer didn’t just pass them by—in “Close to Home,” it “swallowed us whole.” In “Long Goodnight,” he writes like an endearingly overzealous AP English student in one line (“Lest I forget”) before insisting in the next, “I’m not bitter, anyway.” The album takes its palm-muted riffs as seriously as its tender piano ballads. “I’m a Loner, Dottie, a Rebel” imagines a world where multiple time signatures and headbanging breakdowns coexist symbiotically, the former doubling the intensity of the latter. Something to write home about framed the everyday problems of growing up with the intensity of a Victorian drama and was performed with the zeal of a band that wouldn’t miss another opportunity in the studio.

The demos included on the reissue hint at other paths the group could have taken. The band was already well on its way to the poppier side of KROQ’s rotation when James Dewees, a drummer for Kansas City metalcore band Coalesce, joined the band as keyboardist in 1998. Their last EP on Doghouse, Red Letter Dayended with something that, in retrospect, sounds like a hint of what was to come: On “Mass Pike,” Dewees taps out a tinkling melody on the piano while a drum machine comes to life in the background. Whether they knew or not that they were creating a Amadeus-loving pianist when they hired him (Dewees had caught their eye for throwing a drum kit into the audience), the Get Up Kids’ second album would be indelibly marked by his chirping synths and piano runs. His influence – not just on the band’s sound but on the sound of emo offspring like Anniversary and Motion City Soundtrack – is made clear by his absence: An early demo of “Ten Minutes” with the full band, included on the reissue, sounds hollow without Dewees’ earthy melodies. Without the opening piano, a 4-track recording of “The Company Dime” is charmingly modest but thin, just layers of guitar and Pryor’s voice, a world away from the expansive version that ended up on the album.

Elsewhere, the demos reveal iterations of the band’s writing process: The original demo for “Valentine” stumbles through what Pryor described as a “twangy” guitar riff before getting to the wails of its verses. For the final version, the band chose an intro that, if listened to closely, is reminiscent of the Red Letter Day Cut “Anne Arbour”: a bluesy step down the piano scale, accompanied by the drum of a military march. These demos reveal the band’s parallel histories: for diehard fans, they reveal the erratic process that produced triumphant choruses, the wrong turns that could have cost them their shot at the big leagues. For those who, like so many critics, saw any refinement of their sound as a rebuke of punk values, it traces the dark path toward a brighter sound that would eventually betray the band on their languid and melodramatic 2002 follow-up. On the wire.

On the occasion of its 25th anniversary Something to write home about leaves a mixed legacy. It ushered in a cohort of even younger and bolder bands that would shape the next decade of emo – you can thank the Get Up Kids for the new wave headaches of Hellogoodbye. At the same time, it’s a high point for the band and the genre, a collection of surprisingly powerful vignettes of Midwestern ennui, delivered by a group of deceptively skilled musicians. Upon its release, the record was criticised for sounding too commercial – but if you listen to an early demo of Jimmy Eat World’s clarity as you prepared to record your next album, wouldn’t you be looking to up your game? On “Action & Action,” Pryor may be speaking of their own ambitions when he sings, “Overexposure is the key,” and then, “I’ve finally found the right formula.” These demos, which see the band tweak a riff here or a verse there, reveal the magic of their punk-pop alchemy.