The New Amsterdams album not cohesive

The New Amsterdams' new album wanders around in styles and misses the big picture.

By Joey Vergara

Published Oct. 2, 2007

The irony of Matthew Pryor quitting a band named The Get Up Kids to pursue other obligations (family life), but continuing work on his solo effort The New Amsterdams and form The Terrible Twos last year to write children's music is hard to miss.

Irony makes for great literature (see Anton Chekhov and Henry James), so the same might hold true for music, right?

Unfortunately, not in this case.

The Terrible Twos' debut, If You Ever See an Owl... was an interesting and rather heartfelt effort (Pryor wrote the music for his three kids), but when you are writing "serious" music like The New Amsterdams' new record, At the Foot of My Rival, things should sound a little better than they do.

Compared to The Get Up Kids — it might be a mistake to compare the two because Pryor was not the primary songwriter in either band — The New Amsterdams have been rather prolific: six releases in seven years, as opposed to TGUK's four full-length albums in their 10-year existence.

Pryor's songwriting has trailed off, leaving TGUK with a pair of less-than-spectacular albums by the time of their demise and The New Amsterdams in dire need of a revamp.

Pryor's previous Amsterdams records have been an unpredictable hit-or-miss ordeal for Get Up Kids fans watching one of their favorite musicians grow up with a more acoustic-based project. At the Foot is no exception.

The most striking aspect of At the Foot is the inconsistency of it all. "Killed or Cured" stuck to a beautifully stripped-down sound.

2003's Worse for the Wear flirted with the rambunctious alt-country of TGUK's On a Wire. At the Foot wanders too much ground for its own good.

Production styles unabashedly take their turns rotating throughout the album. Although On a Wire's "Campfire Kansas" fit the general mood of the album well with its passive production style, "Revenge" and "Hughes," beautiful as they might be, just bring At the Foot's disjunction into better focus.

They are replete with production fuzz while the rest of the album is considerably slick.

Immediately following "Hughes" comes the arena-sized rock of "A Beacon In Beige." Pryor's voice remains unique and excellent as expected. Whether he is gently crooning or bearing his fangs, Pryor makes his voice work.

Louder tracks like this and "Story Like a Scar" help propel the album from emotional depressions.

After being in the game for so long, though, you have to hand it to Pryor: The man knows how to write a powerful tearjerker. "Fortunate Fool" continues on the path of "Killed or Cured" — hushed, sedate, painfully exposed.

Still, there's a certain cheese factor to be dealt with. Silly falsetto back-up melodies reverberate through "Fountain of Youth" over some of Pryor's worst lyrics to date; "Lost Long Shot" features clanking percussion and harmonica akin to some kind of long lost, but bland railroad workers' tune.

For whatever reason, Pryor's approach to this post-Terrible Twos album is difficult to stomach.

In a way, his inner kid is still getting the best of him, wandering around styles too quickly and missing the bigger picture on At the Foot of My Rival.