In order to cleanse my mind and engage the New Amsterdams' Para Toda Vida without the usual vitriolic Pitchfork anti-Vagrant spiel, I underwent a vigorous regimen of holistic treatments. Employing acupuncture, aromatherapy, yoga, and reiki sessions, I attuned my brain to its optimal meditative state. Most importantly, I received twice-daily 'full body massages' from Maryann's Rub-N-Tug on 14th street, via the considerable expertise of the highly talented 'Vanessa' (tell 'em Rob sent you!).
This meticulous and tax-deductible procedure was necessary preparation for tackling Para Toda Vida, in order to organize every last ounce of journalistic integrity to make a fair assessment of the album's quality. For you see, the New Amsterdams is the solo acoustic project of one Matthew Pryor, singer/guitarist for buzz-bin pop/punk cutie pies the Get Up Kids. And while the Kids have a Pitchfork credibility rating somewhere between Bobby McFerrin and Pablo Cruise, their albums (and spinoffs like this one) are consistent high-charters with the underclassmen crowd. So, as a service to our younger readers, it is my mission to judge the album without bias and on its own terms as Pryor's expedition into singer/songwriterly territory.
Unfortunately, on that scale, Para Toda Vida still isn't-- how you say? Ah, yes-- good. Sure, the brief proceedings succeed at achieving a certain level of low-key intimacy, like a peek inside Pryor's bedroom while he holds a personal strumming session (not like that, perv). But while the concept strives to be third-wave emo's answer to Springsteen's Nebraska or Neil Young's Harvest, Pryor copies the methods while missing the point of the folkie approach, expecting poignancy and emotional depth to spontaneously result from stripped-down instrumentation.
The very structure of the songs themselves exhibit this mistaken attitude, often coming off as typical Get Up Kids fare played during a power outage, rather than compositions written with acoustic instrumentation in mind. Pryor's day job leaves him with little more than two strumming patterns in his arsenal-- the fast strumming and slow finger-picked riffs of an intermediate-level guitar student. Also unmodified is Pryor's standard-issue throaty/nasal pop/punk voice, the uniform peppiness of which instantly strips away any variation in mood or emotional tone.
Nor do Pryor's lyrics survive the extra scrutiny a solo setting casts upon them: while the words manage to avoid the broken-hearted weblog suffering of colleagues Dashboard Confessional, neither do they say, well, much of anything at all. Struggling to paint stirring word images of life's little complexites, songs end up instead with paper-thin morals ("Escape is the only way out") and the kind of condescending lonely-waitress empathy MOR staples Train specialize in. It's telling that the most compelling lyric of the entire album-- "It's possible the piano may be drinking/ But it's not me"-- is an uncredited swipe from an artist Pryor can be reasonably sure his base audience has never heard, Tom Waits.
It may sound like I haven't succeeded in washing my ears of the fact that Para Toda Vida was made, in reality, by a Get Up Kid, but even in a blind taste test it'd be pretty obvious that it's the half-baked meanderings of a pop-punkster minus the drummer and Marshall stack. To tell the truth, appraising the record with Vagrant prejudice intact allows me to make the biggest compliment possible-- that the album isn't any worse than I expected it to be. But whether my chosen lens is objective, subjective, or just flat out pissy, there's no getting around the fact that Para Toda Vida is still ten songs destined for incidental music on the WB's primetime lineup.
