Jason Lytle's second solo album begins much like his first solo album, with a veiled statement about the state of his career. On the title track of 2009's Yours Truly, the Commuter, he claims he was left for dead: "I could give two shits about what they said/ I may be limping, but I'm coming home." At the time it sounded like he was still bristling over the breakup of Grandaddy, the Modesto-based band that soundtracked Lytle's weird tales of space miners and lovelorn robots. The lines were vague enough, however, that you could appreciate the renewed sense of mission without getting caught up in any potential intraband politics. On "Department of Disappearance", which likewise opens and sets the tone for an album of the same name, Lytle explains, "I'll crawl into the mountains, I'll fall into obscurity/ A phantom on the landscape, a memory of what used to be." Is this an ultimatum of some sort? And is the titular institution really a secret society of veteran musicians from the 1990s, still tooling around years after their breakthrough albums and playing to dwindling audiences of aging fans? If Yours Truly announced Lytle's return, Department of Disappearance sounds like a musician embracing obscurity as perhaps the natural outcome of a career whose chief subject has been emotional, mechanical, and ecological entropy.
There's nothing worse than an artist waxing bitter about his career, and to his credit Lytle doesn't sound self-pitying or entitled to more than his current lot. But Department of Disappearance does sound strangely complacent and monochromatic, offering no twists on the technorganic aesthetic he's been plying since Grandaddy were still a bedroom act. The album toggles between the mountains of Europe and the badlands of the American West, as Lytle indulges a bit of emotional mountaineering on "Last Problem of the Alps" and "Matterhorn". Geographically, this is new terrain for him, but musically Lytle is walking in his own footprints. He's climbed similar hills before, both with Grandaddy and as a solo artist. Once again he fashions widescreen panoramas out of instruments seemingly ill suited for the job: chintzy synths evoking Bierstadt landscapes, grotty guitars tracing the country's inexorable westward progress, saccharine strings coloring in complex feelings.
This is, of course, Lytle's thing. And it's a good thing. He's done what few artists possess the vision or the tools to accomplish: He has devised a new combination of styles and instruments into a sound that is immediately recognizable as Lytleputian, and perhaps more impressively he has fashioned a unique perspective from which to write about himself and the world-- specifically America in all its mythic strangeness. Last year's reissue of Grandaddy's second album, The Sophtware Slump, reminded us how vibrant and weird that voice could be, and Department of Disappearance has the distinct disadvantage of following up that release, which provides an unflattering point of comparison for familiar, almost boilerplate songs like "Somewhere There's a Someone" and "Hangtown". If once he imagined a new world defined by millennial fears and technological detritus, on "Willow Wand Willow Wand" and "Get Up and Go" the naivety sounds forced, the sense of whimsy merely workmanlike.
For every valley, however, there is a peak. "Young Saints" sets an uneasy tone with its creeping vocal melody, disembodied drums, and dark intimations of mortality: "Your ex-girlfriends, lost pets, and dead friends," he sings in his trademark deadpan. "No, they won't be hanging out with you again. You are gone!" It's intense and disquieting, yet it's the one song where Lytle sounds most present, with no character, robotic or otherwise, to absorb or soften those fears of absence. Similarly bleak, "Your Final Setting Sun"-- which was, according to Lytle, inspired by Cormac McCarthy-- recounts a killer's final taunts to a dying man: "I know you loved your life, but say goodbye, this is your final setting sun." Has Lytle ever sounded so cold-blooded? So musically malevolent or so emotionally hardened? As the drums barely keep pace with the frantic keyboard themes, his vocals take on a menacing quality that we've never heard from him before and that quite frankly I didn't dream he could muster: It's a bracing moment and completely unexpected, both the album's biggest risk and its biggest reward.
Then Department veers into the valedictory closer "Gimme Click Gimme Grid", and we're back on sadly familiar ground. This is exactly the type of mock-epic album closer that Lytle does almost too well. Think "So You'll Aim Toward the Sky" off Sophtware Slump or "The Final Push to the Sum" off Sumday. But it sounds absolutely anticlimactic sequenced after "Your Final Setting Sun", which suggests a much more inventive and exciting artist than we get throughout most of the album. That song says more about Lytle's career than any veiled lyric could: If he can't push himself in new directions, he'll be stuck at his desk job, pushing paper for the Department of Disappearance forever.
