w/Jesse Malin, Rocky Votolato, Dios
Wed Sept 3, Graceland, 7:30 pm, $10 adv (all ages).
One of the things New Amsterdams singer and songwriter Matthew Pryor--also of the Get Up Kids--has to accept is that his bands will always be associated with a certain category of indie rock he doesn't feel a kinship with. He handles it good-naturedly, though: "Well, I just try to do what we do, you know?" Pryor's speaking on the phone while sitting on his front steps in the college town of Lawrence, Kansas. "Myself, and then the band, too, we write the songs that just come out," he continues. "All we ever really wanted to do was write interesting pop music, or at least pop music that's interesting to us, and it seems that the rest of the world has felt the need to lump us into a category with other bands or people that we don't necessarily find that interesting. We never get lumped into the categories of the bands we're actually listening to." Who might that be, I ask. "We'd love to be lumped in with the Kinks," he says, "but no one's ever going to lump us in with the Kinks." "I most certainly would!" I almost yell. "And so would my friend Kim."
Pryor and the rest of the Get Up Kids stopped by the Cha Cha last time they played Seattle, and spotting Kim Warnick behind the bar, slipped upwards of $100 into her tip jar, to thank her for being a Fastback. I brought a couple of their CDs to the bar the next night, and one song in she said, "You didn't tell me this band was so great! I thought they were one of those lame emo crybaby bands, not the Kinks."
It's not just for the old to call out the right influences, though. Says Pryor, "I'm only 26, and I've been into music for as long as I can remember, and you kind of hit the point where you're like, all right, this is my favorite band, and these are the bands that influenced my favorite band, so I should go and listen to them--and you just keep going backwards from there. I think you can certainly still use those influences and come up with creative influences from there. Yes, [bands have] cycled through all those influences, but we haven't necessarily wrung them dry. There are only so many pop songs you can write in the world--it's all variations on a theme, so it's just a matter of coming up with interesting variations on the variations."
"And hopefully not get misinterpreted on your interpretations," I add.
"Well, you try to wear your influences on your sleeve a little bit, but not so much that you sound like a rip-off," he says. I tell Pryor about the guy from Interpol telling me he was never really into Joy Division. Pryor laughs, saying, "That's just silly," then attempts to stick up for his brethren by pointing out that a statement like that might be a band's reaction to "getting asked the same question too many times. Everyone told the Strokes that they sound like the Velvet Underground, and then the Strokes said, 'We've never heard of the Velvet Underground.' Who the fuck's never heard of the Velvet Underground? All you can do is be honest about it. We're not trying to reinvent the wheel, we're just trying to have a good time [telling someone] why you should listen to the record and why you should go to the show. Maybe you'll forget about shit for a while. I just have a problem with people who get all high and mighty about their music and get really snobby about it." He laughs and says, "It's just something to listen to while you're at the party."
The band's new record, called Worse for the Wear, came out a couple of weeks ago and is a departure of sorts from the earlier New Amsterdams albums, 2000's Never You Mind and 2002's Para Toda Vida. Those were spare yet bruising, and Worse for the Wear features a full band made up of two of Pryor's Get Up Kids bandmates, Robert and Ryan Pope, and guitarist Ed Rose, who also produced the record. Of the differences Pryor says, "It's my third record. We actually spent a good amount of time on it--like a month, as opposed to two days. I don't want to say it's more produced, because that carries a negative connotation, but it's more thought out, and it's more of trying to actually make a record instead of just sort of putting your thoughts on tape and that's it."
There's no therapeutic message to Worse for the Wear, says Pryor. "It was more just therapeutic to do it, to actually physically go into the studio and put it all down on tape. All the records have been something I've needed to do for myself, but this one was very much like, 'Okay, let's try and actually make this a real record.'"
