Grandaddy - Last Place

Drowned In Sound 100

Last August was different though. There was new music, an album was on its way, this was it – the proper comeback that many fans feared would never happen. The band themselves looked genuinely enthused, with Lytle on top form, joshing and joking around, and they sounded leaner and tighter than ever before, no mean feat for a group who, by their own admission, frequently took their lo-fi slacker charm a little close to the edge. Everything augured well, then. But still; you wondered. Can they pull it off? Can a band who imploded in part due to the weight of expectation and level of fame thrust upon them really return ten years later with something that would live up to their past, and sit happily alongside one of the finest indie discographies of the last 20 years? The score at the bottom tells you that yes, they have; but that’s only half the story.

Back at the start of the millennium, the worst thing that seemed likely in our collective future was a few clocks suddenly unable to tell the time. Hope reigned supreme, with the Internet a spark to ignite another great leap for humanity. Against that stood Grandaddy – Lytle captured the post-millennial comedown before it happened and gave short shrift to the myth of technological salvation. Looking back at such wide-eyed optimism from 2017 is a sobering experience, and it would have been very easy for him to come across as smug, writing 'I told you so' deep into his music’s DNA. But he doesn’t do self-righteousness, just achingly beautiful indie-pop full of gentle melancholy, a musical shrug of the shoulders.

One of Lytle’s greatest strengths was the ability to switch effortlessly between cocky songs full of rough charm and tearjerker ballads. There’s less of the former here – which is a shame – but everything else has an emotional depth that’s doleful yet uplifting; strings swoop and soar, mournful piano chords filter through elegant synths, and there’s little scuzziness from his beloved Fender Jazzmaster. There was always a frailty to their music, and at times Lytle’s voice sounds like it might shatter into a thousand pieces; “You’re such a tragic kid” he laments on ‘That’s What You Get For Getting Outta Bed’, sounding close to tears. And yet the song builds to a jolly coda, the sadness of the title flipped on its head. “Out with your friends, I hope it never ends” he notes with a wry optimism.

Grandaddy have always made sad albums but they never lapsed into angst or despair, Lytle’s sense of humanity and our insignificance in front of the natural world leading him to conclude that this is just the way we are. Life is hard, things die, the struggle goes on. Partly inspired by his crumbling marriage, there are moments here where he sounds genuinely crushed; “Where there was love now there’s some other stuff” he sings on ‘This Is The Part’, while grieving is compared to a “Freeway tree / Old and grey / No love in your leaves” on ‘Evermore’. The minutiae of a breakup – deleting photos from your phone and packing up shared belongings – are raked over in painful detail in ‘The Boat Is In The Barn’, but there’s light shining through the cracks, Lytle defiantly declaring that “No…my love ain’t gone”.

It’s an optimism that’s reflected in the song itself, and provides one of several glorious moments; the swelling, cloudburst strings that kick in after the second chorus are heartbreakingly magnificent in every way. The euphoria is repeated on ‘This Is The Part’, ‘Jed the 4th’, and the best – and longest –track here, ‘A Lost Machine’. Grand in all the ways great Grandaddy songs are, it places people in the wide open crucible of nature, wandering around, lost. It moves from quiet to crescendo, from wistful to exultant, and builds and sways with marching drums and swelling strings. Surely destined to be the encore on their upcoming tour, it’s the magnum opus you feel Lytle has been building towards for 20 years; nothing I’ve heard recently has hit me quite as hard, or made me want to cry and laugh and hug someone all at the same time.

Last Place sounds like a man finally making peace with his truth, and striving to appreciate the goodness in life, however fleeting it may be. Grandaddy always seemed like unlikely heroes, five bearded dudes happier scrabbling around in basements than challenging conventions. Trying to change the world is not for everyone, and with this realisation has come freedom; to be themselves, to be content. It’s unclear whether this is a new beginning or a valedictory last hurrah, but in a way it doesn’t matter; it’s beautiful and utterly captivating in its own way and, after all the band and Lytle have been through, that’s triumphant enough.

The Guardian 80

(30th Century Records)

Way We Won’t, the opening track on Grandaddy’s fifth album, has a chugging, Weezer-style fuzz guitar and faux-naive riff that recall their best-known song – AM 180, from their debut album Under the Western Freeway, now 20 years old. But producer Danger Mouse has helped Grandaddy broaden their sonic palette. Last Place is more sophisticated and less self-consciously wacky than some of the Californians’ previous releases, and better for it.

Slower songs This Is the Part and The Boat Is In employ a string section and reach a Mercury Rev-like psychedelic reverie. The melody of I Don’t Wanna Live Here Anymore is instantly memorable. That’s What You Get for Gettin’ Outta Bed starts off as a softly strummed minor-key lament but finishes as a swoonsome remodelling of the Beatles’ It’s Only Love. And Check Injin shows Grandaddy’s alt-rock credentials to be in impeccable order, with its unpredictable lurches in direction and pace worthy of the Pixies.

The Guardian 60

(Columbia)

Jason Lytle’s two solo records rarely strayed too far from the template he’d perfected as Grandaddy frontman –synth-infused symphonic indie shot through with a nagging sense of unease – so the band’s first album in 11 years seems like a seamless continuation. Jed the 4th is a sequel to 2000’s heartbreaking Jed the Humanoid, and familiar themes of loss and loneliness recur throughout, most notably on the bleakly beautiful This Is the Part and I Don’t Wanna Live Here Anymore (the latter an autobiographical take on Lytle’s relocation from Montana to Oregon). Ultimately, though, for all its emotional tug, Last Place is solid rather than spectacular, with nothing quite matching the peaks of their first two albums.

Pitchfork 60

Some Grandaddy songs are about technology. Nearly all of them are about junk: Alcoholic robots and broken household appliances outlive their usefulness and are left to rust. But the same basic fate awaits lost kittens, lonely spacemen, forlorn miners, and hollowed-out cities of rural California, eulogized by a band whose fuzz pedals, analog synths, and withered harmonies always sound like they’re about to give out. And much like Jed the Humanoid, Grandaddy themselves fizzled and popped, and then they just stopped with 2006’s Just Like the Fambly Cat, essentially a Jason Lytle solo album. Given their dedication to documenting entropy, a “triumphant comeback” isn’t the sort of thing one expects from this band. But as Last Place makes clear, the creeping sense that we’ll all just end up in a pile of our emotional and physical baggage never goes out of style.

Lytle had kept busy since disassembling Grandaddy a decade ago: After moving to Montana to escape the relative bustle of the Central Valley, he released two solo LPs, produced Band of Horses, hooked up with Monsters of Blog Rock supergroup BNQT, and found a sensible benefactor in new label head Danger Mouse. But Grandaddy are still a state-of-the-art 2000 band, the sum of slack-motherfucker indie rock, the mid-fi experimentalism of Sparklehorse, and just enough of Mercury Rev and Flaming Lips’ late-’90s prog sweep. Most crucially, The Sophtware Slump countered the pre-millennial tension of trip-hop, Timbaland, and Radiohead with Y2k’s definitive ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ album, speaking to people who came of age during the tech boom and felt like the 21st century could only promise shinier distractions from the same old pervasive suburban boredom.

If Last Place doesn’t exactly sound happy about that fate coming to pass, at least Lytle’s learning to deal. “Way We Won’t” begins the record with him accepting loss as some schmo living atop a box store, enjoying the “tropical smells and back-to-school sales,” the best most people can hope for in adulthood. This unusually zippy pop song is immediately followed by “Brush With the Wild,” also patterned after the closest thing Grandaddy had to a crossover hit (“Now It’s On”), making for the most vigorous eight-minute stretch of music they’ve ever committed to tape. At least musically, that is; lyrically, the trademark weariness remains. “We had a thing, whatever it’s called,” Lytle moans, which is the most Grandaddy way possible to depict a busted romance. “The Boat Is in the Barn” continues the theme: he’s just another hoarder of junk, hanging onto their shared possessions and memories in hope of keeping the past alive, while the ex gingerly deletes pictures from her phone.

Last Place’s first side sounds familiar, but it also promises a new kind of Grandaddy album: an uptempo collection of skewed pop songs without any kind of higher conceptual calling, music that is laid back but not insensate. While “Chek Injin” is Grandaddy at their most punk rock, that surge in energy only goes so far, placing them somewhere in the orbit of Wilco’s Star Wars. As Lytle yells, “please keep going, please keep fucking going,” like he’s trying to siphon one last drop of gas with his mouth, it becomes an unintentionally meta moment, as it’s the last time Last Place strives for any kind of forward momentum.

“I Don’t Wanna Live Here Anymore” and “That’s What You Get For Gettin’ Out of Bed” are pleasant, tuneful throwbacks to a pre–2k indie rock sarcasm, but they spend several minutes reiterating the point immediately made by their titles. The rest of Last Place just ties up loose ends: “You know it’s all a metaphor for being drunk and on the floor,” Lytle sings on “Jed the 4th,” over-explaining prequels that couldn’t possibly be interpreted any other way. “A Lost Machine” aspires to the same Floydian excess as “He’s Simple, He’s Dumb, He’s the Pilot,” but unlike “are you giving in, 2000 Man?,” “everything about us is a lost machine” generates less meaning with every repetition.

Taking the long view, Last Place might actually be a concept record about Grandaddy itself, as it recreates the trajectory of their previous four albums in miniature: quirks slowly congeal into banality, back roads are avoided in favor of familiar scenery. And then it ends like Grandaddy once did, with what essentially amounts to a Lytle solo project (“Songbird Son”). They sound exhausted, right where we left them.