Grandaddy: Sumday

The California indie-rock group Grandaddy has been around in some form or another since 1992, but it didn't really show up on the pop-culture radar until 2000, with the release of its second full-length album. The Sophtware Slump refined studio rat Jason Lytle's earlier fitful attempts to integrate sputtering electronics into his bandmates' country-tinged loping, and the result was an impressive match of music and message, as Lytle's lyrics about decaying technology and his shambling compositions evoked the bleed of the futuristic into the mundane and vice versa. Grandaddy's follow-up, Sumday, refines even further, and perhaps a shade too much. On The Sophtware Slump, the group lurched around until it stumbled into fluid passages of warm buzz and pretty melody. By contrast, Sumday stays fairly smooth throughout, and is so dominated by mid-tempo story-songs that it rarely breaks through into the rapturous highs that Grandaddy is capable of producing. Nevertheless, the even tone–driven by a slow-simmering soup of choral synthesizers and fuzzy electric guitar–creates a specific and consistent mood. On the steady-rolling "El Caminos In The West" and the delicately rueful "Saddest Vacant Lot In All The World," Lytle crafts trinities of humanity, landscape, and machine, putting the three in opposition to each other and establishing a feeling of inescapable loneliness. The quintessential Grandaddy character sits brokenhearted and lost on a stretch of hot pavement next to a malfunctioning car. The quintessential Grandaddy sound melts pretty Todd Rundgren piano balladeering with melancholy Neil Young twang and a modernism-damaged sensibility equally derived from Pink Floyd, Pavement, and Radiohead. The band has developed its core concept to the point where it's almost oppressive, but the scope and singularity of the achievement overcomes any wish that Grandaddy would change gears occasionally. The best way to take Sumday is as an immersive experience, full of powerful imagery and moments of sweetness that celebrate the sad little triumph of being, as one song on the record puts it, "O.K. With My Decay."