Until recently, if you’d mentioned The Get Up Kids you’d automatically think of Matthew Pryor, the band’s singer/ songwriter and mainstay. You’d probably also think of a relatively successful dude who was enjoying the rock’n’roll life. But you’d be some way wide of the mark, for below the surface some rather nasty feelings were bubbling up to the boil.
“By the time I quit The Get Up Kids, I was miserable and everyone could tell,” says Pryor today. “I knew I couldn’t do it anymore and I just couldn’t pull off the lie. We got drunk and into a fight. A lot of the internal conflict with The Get Up Kids had to do with us not talking unless we were drunk.” Pryor, rightly, wanted an escape route and a tunnel to a new place where he could enjoy a better level of communication with like-minded individuals.
Well, with the suitably-titled NEW AMSTERDAMS, it seems he’s got his wish and then some, because with his new companions Dustin Kinsey (lead guitar), bassist Eric McCann and drummer (and ex-Uncle Tupelo alumni) Bill Belzer, Pryor has the makings of some unit: at least if the NA’s debut album “Story Like A Scar” is anything to go by.
Although, “…Scar” was recorded in Nashville and features banjo, lap steel and brushed drums as well as a lot of adroit upright bass playing from McCann, don’t let the trappings fool you. Yes, it’s true the album is tinged with folk/ Americana, but it’s by no means an obvious country-rock record. It’s very much a record made by (slightly) older, wiser guys who have drawn vividly on their disappointments and regrets and forged them into something potent pointing towards the future.
A live and organic, ideally-first-take approach pervades and it suits the songs’ confessional tone. Excellent opener “The Death Of Us” gives you some idea of what to expect with peals of descriptive guitar from Kinsey and some memorably shaky Neil Young-style harmonica. Pryor’s voice is sleepy, lived-in and perfect in this context. It all adds up to a great, thought-provoking start, but it’s soon trumped by “Turn Out The Light”: one of the album’s finest, redemptive moments with a plaintive chorus (“I was lost ‘til I found you/ turn out the light, I’ll stay if you want me to”) which suggests Pryor might have finally turned a corner for the better.
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The stripped-down feel of the music is also apparent on tracks like “Past The Pines” and the superb “Your Ghost”. The former finds echoes of lap steel and Fender Rhodes piano filling in the sparse cracks, while “Your Ghost” is an eerie and ethereal slice of early hours Midwestern noir fuelled by Pryor’s creepy’n’obsessive murmur of a vocal and Kinsey’s sweet’n’sour guitar scraping. There’s a gorgeous, lowing cello riding shotgun and when Kinsey lets rip towards the end you’re reminded of the kind of tour de force Calexico pulled off with their equally unlikely classic “Black Heart.”
Of course, it’s not all semi-acoustic and cracked. Songs like the Replacements-esque abandon of “Intelligent Design” and the Costello-ish “Calendar Days” prove Pryor hasn’t entirely forgotten the wholesome goodness of an amped-up electric guitar, while the bracing “Bad Liar” (“it’s not worth money if your heart just isn’t in it”) eloquently details the minutiae of The Get Up Kids’ demise.
They pull it all together for the spiritual drone of the finale “A Small Crusade”: an affecting tale of small town life and loss based on the true story of a guy who’s house burns down, so he pitches his tent on an island in Kansas’s Kaw River and lives happily ever after in his diminished circumstances. Featuring Kinsey’s wind-tunnel guitar, gamely-plucked banjo and an atmosphere akin to REM’S “King Of Birds”, it’s a magnificent, evocative track where Pryor sings directly to his subject: “By the riverside what you saw/ was salvation on the Kaw/ to free who you were before/ find what you were looking for.” Not only is it good advice, but it’s advice Matthew Pryor and his new buddies have taken to heart as they build themselves a new identity as The New Amsterdams: the best new band from Kansas this writer’s heard since the magnificent Belles.
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