Some bands bow out at the top of their fame; others implode before they even make their first album. After 14 years, Modesto, Calif.'s Grandaddy is calling it quits as their cult fame builds, but they never quite broke through to the mainstream mass audience. Their fifth CD, Just Like The Fambly Cat, sounds like equal parts elegy and fond "see ya soon." The band broke up just before its release, and frontman/lead songwriter Jason Lytle has announced his intention to move from Modesto to the wilds of Montana. Disenchanted rock star heads to the hills – it almost has the sound of a Grandaddy song.
Fambly Cat simmers in a searcher's voice, and even novices to Grandaddy should enjoy the mellow space-rock groove of the album's best songs. Their songs are laden with buzzing guitars, chiming synths and hummable melody. The album settles into a beautiful kind of haze with lonesome tunes like "Summer … It's Gone," "Rear View Mirror," or "The Animal World," with its schoolboy chorus of "joy to the world / it's the end of the world," and a cheery sing-along apocalypse feel. It all adds up to a kind of nostalgic cruise mix, the perfect soundtrack for driving the orchard-laden vast flat highways through California's San Joaquin Valley, bidding farewell to Modesto for good.
Lytle's high, intimate voice has a ’70s AM radio vibe, particularly on the laidback "Where I'm Anymore." But Lytle's voice is distinctly his own, and Fambly Cat charts the move from ennui to life-changing decisions with a novelist's eye. In "Elevate Myself," he sings:
"I don't wanna work all night and day on writing songs that make the young girls cry or playing little solos on a keyboard so the kids will ask me how and why I just wanna / I just wanna / I just wanna elevate myself
Maybe for a little while … I'll find it really hard to hate myself"
Not everything works: the goofy opening track, "What Happened…" is nothing more than a child repeating "Whatever happened to the family cat?" over and over to a noodling background track. The album is divided fairly evenly between short and longer tunes, and it's mostly the ones that stretch out to five, six or nearly seven minutes that have the best tone, given space to breathe. The band owes a heavy debt to the synth-rock of Electric Light Orchestra - telegraphed by the tribute of a dreamy cover of ELO's "Shangri-La" as the album's very last song.
Lytle has crafted an album that's constantly reaching for bliss and never quite finding it. The best of the songs wriggle into your ears and keep coming back to you throughout the day, echoing with subtle grace. Lytle told the Chicago Sun-Times' Jim DeRogatis recently, "I think the big breakthrough that could have come... well, it never did, and we never knew if we wanted that, anyway." Does anyone know they really want, anyway?
Just Like The Fambly Cat is a steadily ingratiating set of would-be anthems capturing that feeling of being caught between the possibilities, rocking with a kind of wistful tension. While it might be the end for Grandaddy, hopefully it's not the last the world hears of Jason Lytle.
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