Get the latest gossip
Grandaddy: Blu Wav review – sorrow leavened by flashes of humour
Getting lost in the California group’s signature drollness and existential angst is an addictive pleasure
The 21st century had barely begun when Grandaddy’s grandest opus The Sophtware Slump arrived, its thrift-store synthesiser threnodies intimating that maybe mankind should have succumbed to the millennium bug after all. Photograph: PRThat latter element has never been as explicit as on their sixth full-length: Lytle’s sole foil throughout is Max Hart, on mooning pedal steel, while song titles like You’re Going To Be Fine and I’m Going To Hell evoke the genre’s deft balance of heartbreak and deadpan drollness. In truth, Lytle’s crestfallen songs – sung in plaintive sigh suggesting Brian Wilson channelling Charlie Brown’s existential angst – are a seductive joy, and getting lost in his soft-focus happy-sadness is an addictive pleasure all its own.
Or read this on The Guardian