Photo: Bandcamp
Indie rock revivals seem to occur every other week these days. NZ welcomed the Pixies, Pavement and the Breeders over the past few years, and the line between broken up and still touring can be slightly smudgy.
Critical darlings Grandaddy formed in the early 90s, split in 2006, and reformed in 2012, and since then have existed in that liminal space. There’s also the question of whether this is a band or solo project, but that’s less important than the music. On their new album Blu Wav, it's decidedly mellow, embracing the slower side of the group’s output and attempting to finetune it.
Looking at liner notes of Grandaddy albums can be surprising: they’ve always been marketed as a band, but only one album, 2003’s Sumday, has credits for each member, with the rest either specifying that singer Jason Lytle played everything, or leaving it purposely vague.
Lytle also makes solo records, and in interviews, he says the distinction comes from “trying to make them sound like Grandaddy songs”. But there’s a lot of overlap, including thematically: ‘Cabin in My Mind’ concerns his well-documented love of the outdoors. Another seems to touch on his divorce, or maybe it’s the latest in a long line of Grandaddy songs about loners, balancing comedy and tragedy in the title ‘You’re Going to be Fine, and I’m Going to Hell’.
You may remember the phrase ‘blue wave’ from our most recent election. In America it’s used when the Democratic party makes headway, and I suspect Lytle had that in mind here too, but the official explanation for this album’s title is that it’s a portmanteau of 'bluegrass' and 'new wave', the genres which had the most influence on the album.
That seems like a bit of an in-joke too though: Grandaddy have always been sonically defined by the merging of these sounds; acoustic strums under fizzing synths, threaded together by lagging drums. They wear them on their sleeve, and the combination still works.
Their masterpiece is 2001’s The Sophtware Slump, an album that perfectly expressed millennium dread, and the incursion of technology into every aspect of society. It was so resonant they were frequently tagged ‘the new Radiohead’.
Touches of that remain, in songs like ‘Jukebox App’, and Lytle is still fond of setting songs about heartbreak in sterile white-collar workplaces. On ‘Watercooler’ he observes a doomed office romance, and the indignity of seeing an estranged partner every day.
On their first album, Under the Western Freeway, the band had plenty of 1990s alt-rock trappings, but those have wizened away over the years, and Blu Wav is strictly made up of ballads, many of them in a waltz time signature. Lytle describes it as “snoozy”, and that’s about right. Leading up to it he hinted it may be Grandaddy’s last (as he has before), and wanting to make something “all encompassing”.
This isn’t that, but it’s certainly focussed, and the narrow scope seems to be impressing reviewers. Others may get restless, and I did miss some of the old volatility, but Lytle remains a singular voice, and I value another trip through his beautifully-rendered set of concerns.
