Album Review: The Get Up Kids – Problems

Oh, the pain of being inexorably tied to a genre that made your name (and that you helped make in turn). Such is the burden of emo upon Missouri’s Get Up Kids, whose ‘90s output defined the scene as much as black eyeliner.

So 20 years from their iconic Something To Write Home About – that celebrated yet somewhat poisoned chalice – the band who strategically dropped the word ‘Suburban’ from their name as a marketing decision in their formative years seem to find themselves contemplating removing the ‘Kids’ too, for here are songs of maturity, reflection, loss, alienation and... Hang on, this is still sounding a bit too familiar. Rather than ‘I miss my girlfriend’ songs, Jim Suptic now devotes two minutes of pop-punk to Lou Barlow (Dinosaur Jr) as just another way of whining “Why do I feel so invisible in this world?”, or adds a splash of '80s keytar magic to the Weezer-esque Waking Up Alone (more ‘Woe is the ravage of age’ wankery). It’s all still a bit insufferably ‘pity me’, especially on the cloying closer Your Ghost Is Gone. No, it’s not emo, but imagine if Train turned it up to 11. Yeah, we’re there.