Grandaddy - Last Place

The first album from the much missed Grandaddy since 2006. It appears Jason Lytle is still able to hit my sweet spot. The first four tracks roll along pleasantly enough, but then we hit the really good stuff, the custardy middle layer of this album. The Boat Is In The Barn is a Mercury Rev-esque stomp ‘n’ swoon with a beautiful middle section. Chek Injin is a stuttering, pulsing piece, and This Is The Part is an utter heartbreaker..”where there was love, now there’s some other stuff, where there is peace, you know I will not be”. The glitchy, hallucinogenic Jed The 4th is a nod to their magnificent previous album The Sophtware Slump. Penultimate number A Lost Machine starts off so tenderly with a swathe of Carpenters-style melancholic piano and the lyrics “Surveillance audio recorder in a dried up creek..”. This is meta Grandaddy in one six minute track, along with train sounds, gruff guitars about a post-apocalyptic situation in a canyon, petering out into white noise. Just beautiful. A sombre, thoughtful, mature offering from a band who know what they’re doing and haven’t given up quite yet. A true keeper.