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Mar 03, 2017 Grandaddy By Lauren Hardy

It’s been 11 years since Grandaddy released an album. They’ve come back just in time. Grandaddy’s textured, robot-core sleeper rock makes a natural comeback, with fresh eyes.

“Brush With the Wild” showers melodic glitches and “Evermore” blushes with Jason Lytle’s vessely glaze, the capillaries of crunching synthesizers bursting slowly. “The Boat Is in the Barn” casts grand gestures, as Lytle attests to a relationship gone but not dissipated by means of a metaphor of a boat. He cries caustically, the emotion tactile and repeated, “Oh no my love ain’t gone, the boat is in the barn,” and splicing off quietly into tiptoeing piano keys, dropping a pin in cloud-gazing synths. The words burn like fireworks in our cheeks. There are moments of strange metaphors pungent and pressing on the issue of something else. We are reminded that listening to a Grandaddy album is like becoming a therapist who has no clue what he’s doing, we search for the hidden meanings in the metaphors from a panicked, pleading driver on “Chek Injin” to the stunning drama of “A Lost Machine.” We are not dealing with a car, nor a boat, and we have never been dealing with a robot. And this perhaps makes Lytle’s concentrate so poignant-he shakes our malfunctioning brains from their cases, and guides us to think about things on a different plane. If there is one thing time has done to Grandaddy, it has personalized the wider outlook.

On Last Place, we find Lytle as plain-faced as he’s ever been, and the result is the indelible frisk of “This is the Part” and the ravishing acoustic-meets-blip candor of “Songbird Son.” Grandaddy is no longer a detached soundtrack hovering over life, it’s articulating within it, and we are getting it in a whole new way. (www.grandaddymusic.com)

Author rating: 8/10