The majority of people who know me well as a person have observed, over the past several years, a certain quirk in the way that I listen to music. In the simplest terms possible, I have a habit of getting into a certain musical sound, style, or genre and listening to nothing but that style of music for a long period of time. These phases last anywhere from a couple days to a few months, but it always seems to happen. And forget trying to listen to something else, it just doesn’t seem to do it for me. Unfortunately, though, my latest fascination (possibly even more present now than it was when I first discovered them) is with the Flaming Lips. I’ve simply fallen in love with their lush brand of melodic synth driven pop music - with the end result of me listening to The Soft Bulletin eight times in a row. The problem with this latest fascination lies in the fact that it’s very difficult to find other bands that sound like the Flaming Lips to an extent where I’m still in the mood to listen to them. They may be the quirkiest band in music today, and despite my best efforts, I have yet to find something that even comes close to the pure aural heaven that is Do You Realize??. I’m still looking forward to picking up Steve Burns’ debut album that has a very Lips-y feel to it, but I can only stream it so many times. So when I heard someone compare Grandaddy to the Flaming Lips (and also the fact that many Lips fans I‘ve talked to are also rabid fans of Grandaddy as well), I went right out and bought 2003’s Sumday without hearing a single track in advance.
And after listening to it several times over the past week, I’ve got to say that Sumday is an absolutely remarkable record - filled with catchy pop songs filled with great hooks and a tremendous amount of lyrical exploration. Not having heard what is generally regarded as the band’s finest hour in The Sophtware Slump, I really have no frame of reference (and therefore, I’m not sure I’m exactly qualified to reviews this album adequately) and can’t really compare. All I can say is that Sumday - while far from perfect and not nearly as brilliant in its conception and execution as either of The Flaming Lips’ previous two outings (or what I’ve lead to believe their previous outing was) - is a genuinely likeable record that’s quirky, intelligent, and filled with great pop song writing. In all honesty, the Flaming Lips comparisons may have been overstated somewhat, but that doesn’t detract at all from Sumday’s simple, tranquil, bittersweet and melancholic clash of beauty and sadness. There’s an epic vibe to these twelve songs, but a traditional indie rock sensibility that keeps them from becoming overblown and pretentious - which is extremely interesting considering that the group’s lyrical imagery often seems to border on the line of pretentiousness.
A California quintet formed in 1992, Grandaddy is a space rock, neo-psychedelic band with enormous ambition but a heart that still belongs to indie rock, a band whose self-admitted goal is to set goals and achieve them in a not-so formulaic or conventional manner. Initially compromised of singer/guitarist/keyboardist Jason Lytle, bassist Kevin Garcia and drummer Aaron Burtch, Grandaddy began as a noisy, lo-fi band, one of many populating the decimated post-grunge music scene searching for success. But where other bands failed, Grandaddy would succeed simply through adaptation and progression. Recruiting additional members Jim Fairchild and Tim Dryden (on guitars and keyboards, respectively), Grandaddy evolved into a more melodic band, using their additional members to create wide, lush sonic soundscapes that they thrived in. The independently released 1996 EP entitled A Pretty Mess By This One Band almost immediately established the band’s growth from their previous, obscure and difficult to find albums, but it wasn’t until 1997 that the band would fully come into their own with the critically acclaimed Under The Western Freeway, a warm and intelligent, yet suitably goofy and tongue-in-cheek album that marked the first of their creative triumphs. The Sophtware Slump followed in 2000, a cleverly titled sophomore release that didn’t just match expectations - it blew them right away. A very loosely structured concept album that seemed to embrace the same thinking of Radiohead’s OK Computer, but from a different perspective, The Sophtware Slump was another in a string of critical successes, but it’s unfortunate that Grandaddy have never got the public recognition they deserve, easily remaining one of the best-kept secrets in American rock music.
Sumday, Grandaddy’s third major label outing essentially picks up where The Sophtware Slump left off, both lyrically and musically, building on the idea of a world where computers have learned to emote, in the process surpassing the humans who have become reliant on them. It all sounds a little to science fiction-y from a descriptive standpoint, but it works in execution due to band leader Jason Lytle’s songwriting talents, combining these detailed accounts of his futuristic dream world with a variety of subtle sonic texturing, filled with bleeding keyboard riffs, detached noises, drum loops and samples that seem to give the music itself the same futuristic vibe as the world that Lytle has created for himself.
Much like most of the best bands of today and yesterday, coming up with a simple classification of Grandaddy’s musical ideology is a difficult one, for several reasons. While their influences can be heard distinctly in the music, the quintet creates a trademark sound that bears only the minimalist of similarities to those influences, and the only real thing linking those influences is the fact that they all take Grandaddy’s mission statement to achieve their goals in a non formulaic manner to heart, producing music that challenges the listener to think and to dissect. The most obvious of these influences - to me at least - was the Flaming Lips, and it was something I picked up on right off the bat (although the fact it was suggested by someone might have had something to do that). Both bands strive for distinctiveness, but at the same time, both seem to have a mind for the conventions of pop music. They both use keyboards and a variety of loops and instruments to make a form of music that doesn’t traditionally employ those instruments. And like the Lips, Grandaddy started out as a band concerned primarily with challenging the idea of noise versus music, before eventually shifting to a more engaging spacey, almost orchestral pop music. But the resemblance really stops there, as the fundamental difference between the two lies in the fact that while Wayne Coyne and the Flaming Lips strive for all-out pop gorgeousness, using synths and loops and digital effects much more liberally, Grandaddy maintain their indie roots and are primarily still concerned with the traditional instruments of rock and roll, using synths and keyboards more for shading and basic melodies and textures than for an all-out assault. It’s Grandaddy’s indie rock heart that gives them a distinct identity, but the physical music itself, a fairly midterm brand of non-obtrusive pop-rock has also earned them distinctions as a band that owes a lot to Pavement, and to a lesser extent, Weezer. In a sense, though, the nerd rock comparisons almost seem fitting given the band’s lyrical content, a mishmash of robotic and computers and observations of the world in which they populate.
Grandaddy’s Sumday is an album that, like it’s predecessor, exists in a different world, lead singer Jason Lytle’s own post-modern, post-apocalyptic dream world in which computers have learned to feel and have ingrained themselves even more so into every day life, vehicles exhibit the tendencies of pack animals, and humans have been rendered all but obsolete, helplessly fighting feelings of inadequacy and uselessness. It’s a fascinating and engaging world, filled with all sorts of absolutely hypnotic imagery, yet at the same time I’m not so sure that this world is actually so far off - a notion that Lytle himself seems to suggest at several points in the recording. And while the whole idea of computers overtaking their masters is not one that hasn’t yet been tackled by bands before them - OK Computer is the most obvious example, but the Flaming Lips too have also examined this issue on some level or another in a few different songs - Grandaddy does it with a different intention. The inescapable darkness and despair of OK Computer, the almost clinical acceptance and defeatist look at the flaws inherent in humanity is avoided, with Lytle instead tackles these ideas from a more emotional standpoint and actually gets involved in his stories, all the while managing a tone that seems to suggest parallels between this science-fiction future and our very present, where things are arguably just as bad anyway. It’s warm and inviting rather than cold and sterile, and that’s really what separates Sumday’s examination from previous ones.
To say that Grandaddy's and Sumday's distinguishing characteristic is its lyrical content alone is to do the album an injustice, because in terms of music, it seems just as interesting, again picking up where the group left off with The Sophtware Slump, only gradually broadening and experimenting while keeping an instantly recognizable overall tone. Much of that recognition factor can be directly related to Lytle’s voice, a soft and even, gentle and reflective voice, a straining near-falsetto that manages to capture a tremendous amount of inflection in spite of its limited range. And truthfully, it’s a perfect fit with his own exploratory lyrics, maintaining a sense of wonderment and wide-eyed fascination with this post-modern world of his. Aside from that, Sumday takes the form of, as I previously stated, a basic indie pop rock that also uses some different lo-fi loops and samples to help give life to the music. Most of the time, this fuzzed-out, gently strummed guitar accompaniment and simple drumming work, but when it is used so heavily and in such a constant manner, it reaches a point where the music - think a dirtier Weezer - eventually doesn’t really seem to fit the progressive feel of everything else involved in the project. For the most part, though, it’s successful, if only because of the earnestness that it seems to add to the music on a whole. The keyboards and synths are the final touch, glossing over the indie sound, but given the band’s limitations - both financially and the fact Sumday was recorded entirely in Lytle’s home studio - it still comes off as a genuinely interesting facet to the music rather than a simple gimmick (at one point, someone actually jokingly told me that Grandaddy probably employed the same $30 Casio keyboard that many of us had as children). The fact that the band didn’t have a tremendous budget too, also seems to help, because the quintet has quickly learned to only use these added touches where the add something rather than going all-out and giving the otherwise warm and very human music a cold and clinical feel (even though some bands are able to heavily use synths and still sound warm and natural, it’s not something that most groups can do).
Opening with eerie sound effects, Lytle and his band quickly jump into the foray with the simple chord progression of Now It’s On, probably the finest cut from Sumday and one of the single best pure pop songs that I’ve heard in years. A steadily strummed guitar is interwoven with touches of keyboards, with the whole song coming off as something simple - but in reality, the clicks and descending, winding keyboard parts prove that notion false. It’s a tremendously catchy song drawing heavily from electronica and eighties new wave, but with a modern guitar-heavy approach to give it some sort of relevance. I’m On Standby immediately follows, a somewhat slower number in the same vein but with an acoustic mentality about it, a song told from the perspective of an obsolete piece of machinery being sent away for repairs and to be updated. The sadness in Lytle’s reflective tone is absolutely terrifying, as he actually seems to capture the mentality of this machine. And while on the surface just a simple song about a robot put out of commission, Lytle seems to also be speaking about inferiority in our own modern world.
The Group Who Couldn’t Say illustrates the absolutely fascinating nature of Lytle’s future world, a story of a group of employees who crumble at the prospect of a day spent outdoors away from their computers and free to actually think. The story, told through a series of anecdotes in which each of the tale’s protagonists tries to deal with the sheer enormity and complexity of this outside world that had been all but forgotten because of modernization, but the band does it with this profound sense of sadness that, while the song itself is vaguely amusing, also gives us an impression that perhaps we aren’t too far off from this reality of forgetting our actual home. Holly saw a bird/But she couldn’t work up any words/She kinda lost her shoes and lost her mind/And smashed her phone upon a falling tree, Lytle sings, with his attention to the story’s details perhaps being the most fascinating thing about it. El Caminos In The West, meanwhile, is filled with beautiful keyboard melodies beneath the surface of guitar work and gorgeous, vividly painted imagery.
Saddest Vacant Lot In All The World is defined by its pure and simple existential sadness, built upon a sombre solo piano piece over which Lytle’s dry harmonics seem to add to a song already dripping with atmosphere. A simple story of two lovers after a fight is powerfully stirring and so affective that it’s nearly shocking - and it’s sheer catchiness nearly catches you off-guard if you’re unprepared. The pulsating, simple keyboard of Stray Dog And The Chocolate Shake sounds like something out of a home-made eighties dance song, but actually acts as a cover for a brilliantly catchy song filled with swirling psychedelia and a driving drum beat over which Lytle’s raspy voice creates a sort of contrast between humans and machines.
I’m OK With My Decay as a vague sort of Radiohead vibe to it that seems to stem largely from the keyboard part that plays steadily under the rest of the instrumentation. It’s sweeping and, like another review stated, the sheer catchiness of it all - especially considering the profundity of the lyrical statement - is almost jarring. The Warming Sun is another piano-heavy ballad, a simple ode to lost love that takes its inspiration from the piano piece upon which it is structured. Gradually ascending as the song continues, with instruments joining until it reaches a crescendo toward the end, before dropping off back into the simplicity of the original piano part. The whole affair closes with the lush instrumentation of The Final Push To The Sum, filled with all sorts of countermelodies and loops, a spacious number that closes the album perfectly with Lytle repeatedly asking the listener What have I become?.
There have been better albums than Sumday released so far this year, and there will likely be more releases better than it before year’s end. But the lyrical presence and the sombre, reflective and bittersweet sadness that pervades every corner of Sumday is haunting and makes for a great listen. While on the surface a simple story of a futuristic world, it’s also a social commentary, a cautionary tale to humanity that if we don’t change our ways, sumday, this post-apocalyptic world could become a reality. Lyrically engaging and simply beautiful in terms of music, Grandaddy have proven themselves to be one of the best bands around. Sumday isn’t perfect, but it’s a shockingly profound and intelligent record filled with great instrumentation and excellent use of synths and loops.
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