Grandaddy Fail to Capture Past Highs on Blu Wav

Grandaddy have always been indie rock’s answer to steampunk—somehow wholly contemporary, obsessed with the future and tethered to the past. Jason Lytle’s songwriting has always been as concerned with the beauty of the natural world as he is a fictional android poet named Jed—with life under the freeway like distant planets, with a gently-strummed acoustic guitar like a mesmerizing synth hook. Ever since Grandaddy formed in Modesto, California back in the early 1990s, the band have been perpetual underdogs. Once holding the distinction of being one of a half-dozen bands deemed the “American Radiohead,” Grandaddy eventually landed closer to the younger cousin of Pavement or Built To Spill. When they have broken through, it’s been brief and unexpected—like when their 1997 single “A.M. 180” was featured five years later during a pivotal scene of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later.

It’s been 27 years since Grandaddy’s debut record and, largely, they have retained what has always made them as charming as they are difficult to pin down. Though their latest LP, Blu Wav, marks only the second record Lytle has released as Grandaddy in the last 18 years, there remains a subtle arc to his discography, one that he continues here with a few key, and admittedly uneven, changes. “There hasn’t been one song, in the hundreds of songs that I’ve released over the years, that’s had one note of pedal steel on it,” writes Lytle in press materials accompanying the record—a fact he conclusively changes here, not only embracing the instrument but letting it shape the record in its entirety.

Grandaddy have a history of being both highly specific and difficult to describe in a way that doesn’t sound very general. Their sound is one of subtleties rather than extremes, never reshaping a genre or style, but finding nuances within it. Here, a kind of classic, timeless country is clearly Lytle’s north star, a place where quaint heartbreak and sullen lovesickness are the coin of the realm. Now, on its face, a pseudo-country Grandaddy record chalk full of pedal steel and yearning checks more than a few boxes for this writer. And yet, it gives me no pleasure to report that this might be the very thing holding Blu Wav back from approaching the highs of Lytle’s best work.

Think of the best moments throughout the Grandaddy discography and you will rarely praise them for their consistency. Blu Wav is nothing of the sort, and frustratingly so. By Lytle’s own accounting, seven of the 13 songs on the album are waltzes, which, it turns out, might be far too many waltzes. The lonesome, ambling tone works on a few occasions—the slowcore shuffle of “You’re Going to Be Fine and I’m Going to Hell,” the vengeful misery of “Jukebox App,” the genuinely affecting “Ducky, Boris, and Dart”—but becomes, as a whole, deliberate to a fault. There are long stretches on Blu Wav that beg for variation, pleading for just a hint of life to sprout amongst the many dusky sunsets and lonely nights that define this record. It makes the few moments of vitality shine even brighter. You wouldn’t necessarily call a song like “Watercooler” an exercise in vigor—there’s still plenty of heartache and pedal steel here—but there is, at the very least, a momentum to the arrangement, something sorely lacking from the majority of Blu Wav.

Presented with such a blunt palette, it’s hard not to dig deeper into the thematic throughlines of Blu Wav. Stories of isolation and detachment have been present long throughout Lytle’s own narrative canon but, as his career has progressed, he has seemed to gravitate more towards the personal than the metaphorical. He invites us early on to enter the “Cabin in My Mind” because, he says, “this life is not a dream.” From there, we are flooded with tales of loneliness, self-flagellation and deep regret that are often vague on specifics but all too direct in tone.

Perhaps it’s telling that the highlight of the record finds Lytle as his most cosmically hopeful even among poignant loss. “Ducky, Boris, and Dart” tells the story of three dearly-departed animals—two cats and a bird—whose stories stretch across time and space. There are certainly shades of poor old Jed the Humanoid here, but these are real animals who really lived—an important distinction.“Well thank you my friend, but this ain’t the end. We will meet again,” sings Lytle, with a distinctly hopeful lilt not present on the majority of Blu Wav. It’s a song that reminds you of the off-kilter humanism Grandaddy are able to muster at their best and, unfortunately, puts into stark contrast the rest of an often-disappointing chapter.

Sean Fennell is a culture writer from Philadelphia attempting to listen, watch, and read every single thing he can get his hands on.