Grandaddy have a sound so unique, so otherworldly, so fascinating, that to describe it in mere words would be like attempting to describe the effect of chocolate using hand signals. Check out Ginger’s past Secret History Of Rock’n'Roll entries.

GRANDADDY
Just Like The Fambly Cat
2006 – V2

Of the many traditional reasons for bands splitting up – musical differences (read: cocaine-based ego problems), drainage of inspiration (read: too much money) and being dropped from a major label/management (read: the timely and welcome cull of useless posers acting at being in a band) – no reason could be as gallant and, ultimately, as frustrating as a band forced to split due to a staunchly independent stance against major label consumerism. Starved of funds and stunted through lack of exposure, the bands that you SHOULD be keeping in a living have often been run into the ground before they’ve had a chance to dance with a new audience. When music is more important than money history would indicate that music always suffers.

Time and time again your favourite new band will be discovered years after their demise. Still, what is infuriating, in extreme, is when the band in question leave us with their best album to date, and in Grandaddy’s case, one of the eeriest, most melancholy pieces of indie pop that ever graced the lucky ears of anyone fortunate enough to have heard it.

Just Like The Fambly Cat lives in a space designed by David Lynch and Brian Wilson as they attempt to reassemble the components of ELO using bearded, baseball-capped, trailer-park weirdos. Employing harmony-laden pop music as a magic carpet with which to visit dark landscapes while copping a slipstream of extreme sadness, Grandaddy have a sound so unique, so otherworldly, so fascinating, that to describe it in mere words would be like attempting to describe the effect of chocolate using hand signals.

The fourth and final offering by this Californian five-piece, the brainchild of the awesomely talented Jason Lytle, follows a trio of devastatingly moving albums, beginning with 1997’s Under The Western Freeway, a delicious blend of Pavement and Weezer, featuring the absolutely classic ‘Laughing Stock’.

In 2000 The Sophtware Slump saw the band gain a foothold in the UK indie community, the band’s base weirdness creating an aura of mystery irresistible to bottom-feeding NME journos largely deaf to the album’s twisted greatness. And while the sadly defunct XFM made a healthy meal of the dreamlike ‘He’s Simple, He’s Dumb, He’s The Pilot’ this album’s Jeff Lynne-sized ambitions were lost in a world of stripped-down garage fodder.

Third album, Sumday, 2003, made for lazy journalistic comparisons to Radiohead who all but blithely ignored its Flaming Lips-go-country zest, showcased no better than by the incredible opening track ‘Now It’s On’.

It would be with depressing irony, then, that by 2006 the band would call it a day at the very point where their sound became solidified as a bona fide American classic, and Just Like The Fambly Cat would usher out one of the most inventive and wonderful bands in US rock history.

Lifting off with the simultaneously joyous and heartbreaking ‘What Happened…’, which features a little girl repeating the line ‘what happened to the family cat?’, to devastating effect, in front of a clicking, whirring, piano track straight out of Eraserhead. As simple as it is heart-rending, this wondrous little oddity acts as the perfect introduction to the stunning ‘Jeez Louise’, which sees the controls handed to robots on psychedelics. Lytle’s voice sighs in sweet concert with the raging and raw guitars, building to an astonishing crescendo that suggests every cool noise in the world is gathered here for your enjoyment.

‘Summer…It’s Gone’ begins as almost pedestrian by comparison until it hits a groove deserving of The Cars and eventually blisses out on its own wave of warm Beach Boys harmony. Huge and lush, this is atmospheric music plugged directly into a 70s pop/rock circuit board and then given the keys to the medicine cabinet.

‘Oxygen/Aux Send’ is a minute long orchestral segue spliced to the cool and sumptuous ‘Rear View Mirror’, a harmony strewn, laid back swinger that explodes into an awesomely uplifting chorus.

‘Animal World’, its refrain sounding creepily like ‘end of the world’, is the sound of isolation made sonic. Sound effects pile up with crystal-meth obsessiveness in a track that takes its own sweet time in establishing its ghostly presence before giving up to the sprightly instrumental ‘Skateboarding Saves Me Twice’ that shares as much a Flaming Lips style title as their disregard for convention, mashing up crazy noises with smooth instrumentation.

The delightful lyrical twists of ‘Where I’m Anymore’, mixed with the precise but mellow drive of the backing track recall early REM circa Reckoning, lulling the listener into a very false sense of security until the skatecore punk meets Sonic Youth of ‘50%’ makes for a confusing minute of highly inappropriate noise. Normal service is eventually resumed in the celestial ‘Guide Down Denied’ which takes us, once more, to the beach, albeit a beach on Mars.

The mood is kept light with a shot of whimsy on the joyous ‘Elevate Myself’, probably the album’s most up-beat moment. Spiky guitars are side stepped by panoramic choral sections, and then back again, all the time held down by Jason Lytle’s beautifully haunting vocals.

Equally ‘Campershell Dreams’ has an undeniable charm that owes a large debt to Lytle’s voice creating an almost unbearably poignant world-weariness.

80s new-wave pop is paid a welcome revisit in the melodic perfection that is ‘Disconnecty’, a slinky gem with a Devo meets Sparks rhythm that quickly reveals Lytle to be an expert songwriter, as well as a keen musical aficionado, so subtle and unassuming is the attack.

‘This Is How It Always Starts’ has a classic feel which gives way to a 60s sensibility that evokes the best moments of Radiohead’s The Bends mixed with an almost Cocteau Twins airiness.

And then, all too soon, ‘Shangri-La (Outro)’ signals the end of this sensational album in typically Cecil B Demille sized cinematic brilliance. Operatic and orchestral, it’s captivating refrain of ‘I never will return’ suggesting the albums protagonist, namely Lytle, has left the comfortable family environment to embark on a journey of discovery to pastures unknown, only to find themselves lost like an astronaut separated from his ship.

And so the final chorus acts as an awful prophecy to the disbanding of this particular family, and Grandaddy are all but seen walking a dusty road into the sunset, surely an image of deliberate creation by Jason Lytle himself, knowing that the life of this beautifully peculiar band was hanging by a ragged string that was eroding systematically by the weight of their own commercial conscience.

What might have come from subsequent releases is, sadly, for fantasy only. The unlikely yet wildly accessible soundscapes that this band create could have seen Grandaddy acquaint themselves with an audience every bit as large as, say, Radiohead. The difference is that Grandaddy would have undoubtedly continued to make albums of consistently enjoyable majesty, power and sheer head scratching weirdness as opposed to the bleepy, self absorbed art house fluff that everyone knows Messrs. Yorke and Co irregularly churn out.

Am I just being an uber-geek by missing Grandaddy so much? Or is this music really as meaningful as I suspect it to be?

Answers in comment section below please.