Some Grandaddy songs are about technology. Nearly all of them are about junk: Alcoholic robots and broken household appliances outlive their usefulness and are left to rust. But the same basic fate awaits lost kittens, lonely spacemen, forlorn miners, and hollowed-out cities of rural California, eulogized by a band whose fuzz pedals, analog synths, and withered harmonies always sound like they’re about to give out. And much like Jed the Humanoid, Grandaddy themselves fizzled and popped, and then they just stopped with 2006’s Just Like the Fambly Cat, essentially a Jason Lytle solo album. Given their dedication to documenting entropy, a “triumphant comeback” isn’t the sort of thing one expects from this band. But as Last Place makes clear, the creeping sense that we’ll all just end up in a pile of our emotional and physical baggage never goes out of style.
Lytle had kept busy since disassembling Grandaddy a decade ago: After moving to Montana to escape the relative bustle of the Central Valley, he released two solo LPs, produced Band of Horses, hooked up with Monsters of Blog Rock supergroup BNQT, and found a sensible benefactor in new label head Danger Mouse. But Grandaddy are still a state-of-the-art 2000 band, the sum of slack-motherfucker indie rock, the mid-fi experimentalism of Sparklehorse, and just enough of Mercury Rev and Flaming Lips’ late-’90s prog sweep. Most crucially, The Sophtware Slump countered the pre-millennial tension of trip-hop, Timbaland, and Radiohead with Y2k’s definitive ¯*(ツ)*/¯ album, speaking to people who came of age during the tech boom and felt like the 21st century could only promise shinier distractions from the same old pervasive suburban boredom.
If Last Place doesn’t exactly sound happy about that fate coming to pass, at least Lytle’s learning to deal. “Way We Won’t” begins the record with him accepting loss as some schmo living atop a box store, enjoying the “tropical smells and back-to-school sales,” the best most people can hope for in adulthood. This unusually zippy pop song is immediately followed by “Brush With the Wild,” also patterned after the closest thing Grandaddy had to a crossover hit (“Now It’s On”), making for the most vigorous eight-minute stretch of music they’ve ever committed to tape. At least musically, that is; lyrically, the trademark weariness remains. “We had a thing, whatever it’s called,” Lytle moans, which is the most Grandaddy way possible to depict a busted romance. “The Boat Is in the Barn” continues the theme: he’s just another hoarder of junk, hanging onto their shared possessions and memories in hope of keeping the past alive, while the ex gingerly deletes pictures from her phone.
Last Place’s first side sounds familiar, but it also promises a new kind of Grandaddy album: an uptempo collection of skewed pop songs without any kind of higher conceptual calling, music that is laid back but not insensate. While “Chek Injin” is Grandaddy at their most punk rock, that surge in energy only goes so far, placing them somewhere in the orbit of Wilco’s Star Wars. As Lytle yells, “please keep going, please keep fucking going,” like he’s trying to siphon one last drop of gas with his mouth, it becomes an unintentionally meta moment, as it’s the last time Last Place strives for any kind of forward momentum.
“I Don’t Wanna Live Here Anymore” and “That’s What You Get For Gettin’ Out of Bed” are pleasant, tuneful throwbacks to a pre–2k indie rock sarcasm, but they spend several minutes reiterating the point immediately made by their titles. The rest of Last Place just ties up loose ends: “You know it’s all a metaphor for being drunk and on the floor,” Lytle sings on “Jed the 4th,” over-explaining prequels that couldn’t possibly be interpreted any other way. “A Lost Machine” aspires to the same Floydian excess as “He’s Simple, He’s Dumb, He’s the Pilot,” but unlike “are you giving in, 2000 Man?,” “everything about us is a lost machine” generates less meaning with every repetition.
Taking the long view, Last Place might actually be a concept record about Grandaddy itself, as it recreates the trajectory of their previous four albums in miniature: quirks slowly congeal into banality, back roads are avoided in favor of familiar scenery. And then it ends like Grandaddy once did, with what essentially amounts to a Lytle solo project (“Songbird Son”). They sound exhausted, right where we left them.
