Great Grandpa, 'Patience, Moonbeam' Album Review

Great Grandpa Reunite and Flourish on Patience, Moonbeam

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In October 2019, ahead of their second album Four of Arrows, Great Grandpa held a listening party at Life on Mars, a vinyl bar in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. Sitting on the furniture with the attendees—many of whom were friends and participants in the local music community—and listening to the unreleased LP as it spun on the turntable, the shift seemed obvious. Plastic Cough’s infectious update of ‘90s alt-rock had given way to something more lush, thoughtful and mature; the spectacular entirety of Side A ran wholly undisturbed by a hushed crowd. I remember recalling what bandmate Dylan Hanwright had told me months before, behind the counter of the coffee shop we worked at. “I genuinely feel like we’ve made something special,” he said, the final draft of the album art pulled up on his phone.

He was right. Four of Arrows wasn’t just another great Great Grandpa record; it projected, in even greater clarity, the compositional ambition hidden underneath their debut’s inchoate squeals. It reinforced lead songwriter Pat Goodwin as a prism able to refract the band’s ideas into a cohesive whole; it showcased lead singer Al Menne’s ability to channel raw emotion and wield it like a glass dagger, precise and almost imperceptibly sharp. Two weeks later, the pair sat together on the makeshift plywood stage of a Ballard record store and performed songs of the record to a local crowd crammed between the aisles of vinyl, greedy for just a few more moments where the band could still conceivably be called theirs. “All things fade…” sang Menne, a prognostication.

Great Grandpa continued to drift apart: Pat and bassist Caroline Goodwin moved to Denmark; Menne went to Los Angeles, probably still in all red, and recorded an excellent debut album; Hanwright and drummer Cam LaFlam stayed in the area and put out an equally excellent LP as Apples With Moya. Six months after the pandemic shuttered venues and shifted the paradigm, the band scrapped a follow-up record. All of this forecasted a hasty end to a group that had only briefly tapped into their full potential.

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What a pleasure it is to write that Patience, Moonbeam gets everything right. At a baseline, it’s a welcome return that manages to include elements from each of Great Grandpa’s previous efforts, the distortion-ridden anthems of Plastic Cough and the acoustic-centric instrumentation of Four of Arrows alike. But it wouldn’t be Great Grandpa without a push in new directions, and Patience, Moonbeam is full of them. The most notable shift is the band’s embrace of country, a move that could be read as savvy (given how much the genre has become inextricable from mid-2020’s rock) but instead makes for a logical progression from Four of Arrows’ folky swerve. New contributor Nick Levine’s weeping pedal steel sets the scene, over which Menne adds a twang to his voice on the ebullient “Junior” and the tender “Top Gun.” On the other end of the spectrum are the subtle forays into electronic manipulation, like the whiplash from Menne’s voice twisted upward on “Ladybug” and the fragile instrumental of the title track. It’s not a sea change to the same degree as their previous record was six years ago, but it does re-establish the band as restless sonic adventurers within the bounds of their airtight songwriting.

And really, the songs are at the heart of the project. The ones on Patience, Moonbeam are strong. It’s a patchwork quilt of patchwork tunes, familiar chords embellished by unconventional structures and stellar production work. (Hanwright, who co-produced Four of Arrows, takes full production and mixing credit here). Take “Doom,” the album’s multi-part fulcrum point, which begins with formant-shifted vocals and a minor key guitar arpeggio in ⅞ time and, somehow, ends with LaFlam’s bombastic red-pushing cymbal crashes and one of the album’s best hooks. Album closer “Kid,” one of the only holdovers from the band’s scrapped Four of Arrows follow-up, is similarly expansive: a harrowing reckoning of lost life that moves the way grief moves, from solemnity to catharsis and back, its pieces rippling recursively like perturbed lake water as Caroline’s bass hits the gut. “Never Rest” may be the finest among the record’s emotional landscapes because of how effectively it sets up its climax, teasing it out in Abby Gundersen’s flurries of violin before letting loose unexpectedly, lustrously.

It’s also, according to the band, the most collaborative of Great Grandpa’s three albums. Pat’s songwriting, in contrast to the previous record, is now a foundation for the rest of the band to build on, each idea weighed less in ego than in service to the song. It results in even more small set pieces, like the brief interlude “Kiss The Dice” and the introductory “Sleep,” to queue up the more magnificent ones. It means that no matter who’s leading the songwriting—whether it’s LaFlam singing on “Ephemera” or Menne on “Top Gun” and “Kiss The Dice”—the record flows as one. Despite the piecemeal songwriting process and the miles separating its members, Patience, Moonbeam demonstrates a band in rare absolute unity on what their songs should be and how they get there.

That unity is reassuring, because it’s uncertain how much time, if ever, it will take before Great Grandpa decide it’s time for another record. Adult responsibilities and career decisions originally caused the dream to unravel, and those things don’t often reverse in age. One more LP is already a gift, but in putting out yet another accomplished record, Great Grandpa prove that neither time nor space can keep them from doing what they always do. So goes the promise Menne yells at the album’s outset: “Just let me know and I’ll come around.”

Rob Moura is a Seattle-based writer and musician. He’s also a barista, in case you need to know what the restroom code is.

Great Grandpa Reunite and Flourish on Patience, Moonbeam

The Seattle band’s long-awaited third album is a patchwork quilt of patchwork tunes, familiar chords embellished by unconventional structures and stellar production work.