Jason Lytle re-visits Grandaddy, and it’s been a while. Firstly the comeback album Last Place in 2007, then the death of bassist Kevin Garcia, followed by a tour to celebrate the re-issue of the seminal Sophtware Slump. Along the way we’ve had a few appearances from Jason from time to time, and out of the blue another Grandaddy album, which appears to be more a Jason Lytle solo album than previous outings, the distinctive lo-fi chugging of old being generally replaced with lush orchestration and the country twang of pedal steel, ‘an inordinate amount’, according to Jason himself.
There are still the old themes, including the juxtaposition of nature and the modern world. The lo-fi noises and analogue synths which made their earlier work so distinctive have been pushed well back in favour of the lush strings of songs like “Long As I’m Not The One” and “On A Train Or Bus”. With its tasteful production and low twangy guitars it wouldn’t sound out of place as the background music to breakfast at the lodge in Twin Peaks, “damn fine coffee” and all. They always had the tag of alt. country and here they prove just how good they are when they concentrate on this side of themselves, perhaps more successfully than Wilco at that particular game. Take the beautiful floating pedal steel on “Ducky, Boris and Dart”, or the twangy dreamlike “Cabin In My Mind”, as examples. Seven of these songs are in waltz time, bringing to mind Neil Young and Bob Dylan‘s nostalgic yearning for the old time songs played on wilderness radio in the 40’s and 50’s all over the mid west, or even the soundtrack to the post-apocalyptic computer game Fallout. With the exception of drums most of these songs were recorded and layered at Jason’s home studio, which, along with the very personal and lonesome subject matter, does give it more of a sense of a solo project.
Jason spent a lot of time out in the wilderness, inspiring many of the songs on this album, which is infected with a vast, yet beautiful loneliness, from the plaintive yearning of “Jukebox App” (‘love’s a flame that dies’), to the distant coyote calls in “Yeehaw In The Year 2025”, but the stand-out song on this album has to be the penultimate number “Nothin’ To Lose”, which starts with a slow, lazy strum and just grows and grows in both scope and sadness, the strings and pedal steel crying with a sense of loss as Jason sings ‘the angels weep and then they laugh’.
This album greets you like an old friend in a mid west bar (‘over some beer somewhere near here’) and drowns its sorrows along with you, and makes you feel that, yes things aren’t always going to be fine, and the ‘long and lonely’ road is often tough and full of pitfalls and loss, but you’ll be fine…we’ll all be ok. As one person wrote in the comments for the video for “Long As I’m Not The One”, ‘I’m not alone…I’m with Grandaddy“.
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Review by Andrew Wood
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