Genre: Neo-Psychedelic Year: 2003 Country: USA Official Site: Grandaddy Details: Tracks & Audio Label: V2/Bmg
As is par for the neo-psychedelic quartet Grandaddy, their third shimmering disc Sumday deals in alienation—albeit a strangely friendly sort. Coming to us from the desolation of middle-of-nowhere Fresno, California, this CD shares, if not musically but in theme, the same icy loneliness of Sigur Ros but with a heaping helping of small-town America—the sort of small town that dried up when the local factory chained its entrance shut. Amidst the housewife dresses, dingy bars and rusted-out, cobweb-strewn cars parked in front yard, singer and main songwriter Jason Lytle also deftly mixes in 21st-century technological isolation, where e-mail drowns out human voices and a screen replaces the face of a friend.
His frail voice speaks for those who are lost in the midst of a crowd of people whom you can place their face, but cannot recall their name; for those whose heads are full of reams of data but can't recall the most important memories and meanings. You could sit on the front porch of a house in Anytown, USA, listening to this CD, watching (and hoping for) our dingy human to revert back to earth.
That makes it sound awfully depressing, doesn't it? That's what's magnificent—it's not. (Well, except for the aptly titled "The Saddest Vacant Lot in All the World.") "Stray Dog and the Chocolate Shake" is a magnificent opus of small-town life that's scrambled up into an aural omelet with bits of the Electric Light Parade theme oozing out around the edges. On "Lost on Yer Merry Way," the travelers explore the same spacey alienation that Grandaddy beautifully covered on "Miner at the Dial-a-View" on Sophtware Slump except this time they've eschewed outer space for the open road.
The title "O.K. With My Decay," says it all—Sumday is a diary of a man who finds himself by losing himself, backed up by sweeping pop, tinkling electronics and soft spacey rock approach that's infused with just the right amount of both sadness and light. All is lost, but it's found again.
Grandaddy Sumday
