Grandaddy

The California group released their strongest collection of songs so far on this 2000 full-length. Their detached, poignant love/hate songs dedicated to technology were wrapped in homespun acoustic guitars and rustic bleeps. Great melodies drawing from everyone from the Flaming Lips to E.L.O make this record a wonderful, unique experience.

The second album from this Modesto, California, band is a loose indie-rock suite about how
sad and funny and fleeting technology actually is. The suggestion from frontman Jason
Lytle (also Grandaddy's principal instrumentalist) is that all technology eventually becomes
as poignantly dated as old toaster ovens and vacuum cleaners. The title of the noisy,
well-sculpted tune "Broken Household Appliance National Forest" speaks for itse... More >

One thing I like about Jason Lytle is that I usually know what he's talking about. If he calls one "Broken Household Appliance National Forest," that's what it's about, to go with the booklet pix of dead keyboards in the gravelly dirt. Computer keyboards, that is--final image is a guy in a cowboy hat carrying a Casio into the sunset, and if you don't take the cowboy part literally (think last frontier, not Gunsmoke) that's pretty much what the music is like. It's the end of the day, you're sitting in your house in the exurbs feeling kind of sad for reasons you don't fully understand, although you do wish your humanoid pal Jed was still around. So you make up tunes that feel as blurry as you do. So you aim toward the sky and rise high today, fly away, far away from pain. (Grade - A-)