Grandaddy

Image Credit: Dan Cronin

Be ready, Bristol – Grandaddy incoming.

Jason Lytle’s lo-fi indie outfit are big on melodies and big on weird – and, they’re twenty-five this year. Riding the wave of anticipation, expect oddball curveballs new and old, including the best moments of the band’s definitive, nineties catalogue and indeed selections from their more recent years…

Best remembered for their late-nineties, technophobic LP, The Sophtware Slump, Granddaddy are the spokespeople for analogue conservatism, and if songs like Jed the Humanoid (a eulogy to an android who’s drunk himself to death) can’t convince you, then I’m sorry, I don’t know what will….

Since reuniting in 2012, the group have been feverishly at work on Last Place, their first record in eleven years. Judging from the quality of the singles released thus far (scuzzy, synthy alternative rock with a pip-poppin’ edge) we’re in for a trip down memory lane. Fat square waves, distortion pedals and Y2K bemoaned. It all feels like it looks – synthesisers held together with scotch tape and despair in the face of the interweb, or whatever it is they call it now.

Like any competent handler of the pop melody, Lytle cites both The Beatles and Jeff Lynne’s Electric Light Orchestra as influences. One listen to one of the band’s bigger tracks (Hewlett’s Daughter, The Crystal Lake) and you’d be forgiven for thinking it wasn’t a misguided post-grunge project belonging to one of those bands, not least since Lytle sounds just like Neil Young (and it’s not difficult to imagine a heritage-era runion via grunge involving Bernard Shakey).

You gotta see this band, damnit. They’re insane and they sound exactly like all the things indie music is supposed to stand for. Stop wasting time and get booking!