Blu Wav DANGERBIRD
8/10
THE great gift of Grandaddy records has always been their ability to immerse the listener in a distinct musical landscape. The small-city drift of Under The Western Freeway, the humidity of 2000’s The Sophtware Slump.
The band’s sixth studio album belongs to somewhere new again: in part rooted in Modesto, the California city where songwriter Jason Lytle was raised, and to where he returned in 2016, setting up a home studio. It belongs, too, to neighbouring Nevada, where in recent years Lytle has liked to take long desert drives. And in some way it is a record of Tennesseehaving heard Patti Page’s 1950 recording “Tennessee Waltz” spilling out of the car radio, and wondering whether maybe heartbreak didn’t sound something like pedal steel.
