In a more robust market for emotional, guitar-forward rock, Great Grandpa’s 2019 album Four of Arrows might have made the group overnight favorites. Instead, the album found a more gradual, muted reception, earning Great Grandpa a reputation as one of the most underrated bands in emo-adjacent indie rock, as well as the quiet admiration of their peers. Chicago’s Ratboys opted to record their 2023 breakout The Window at Seattle studio Hall of Justice in part because Great Grandpa recorded Four of Arrows there. It may not be fame, but that’s a nice little legacy, to have someone hear your album and be inspired to make one as wonderful.
A band can build on that kind of goodwill—provided, of course, that band gets around to releasing a follow-up album, and for a time it seemed possible Great Grandpa might not. Attempts to record new music in 2020 never yielded anything, and by a year later the group had scattered, with singer Al Menne moving to Los Angeles to finish a solo record and guitarist and primary songwriter Pat Goodwin and bassist Carrie Goodwin starting a family in Denmark. That distance must have been especially painful for this group, judging from how tightly they squeeze together in every press photo, as if any sunlight between them might burn. Big Thief has always been the most obvious point of comparison, not only because of their shared overlap of country, grunge, and cosmicality, but because of their closeness as a unit, the suggestion of an unbreakable telepathic link.
Patience, Moonbeam, the belated follow-up to Four of Arrows, sometimes plays like Great Grandpa’s attempt to reconcile their time apart. “Task,” a sweet and ultimately triumphant account of their reunion, opens with an account of overcoming the initial awkwardness of adjusting to each other’s new lives and identities: “Saw you at a party, we called you by your new name/You had changed, but the heart of you was still the same.” Leaning into those themes of change, Menne transforms and manipulates their voice throughout the record, sometimes blurring it with their bandmates’ backing vocals like smeared charcoal on a canvas, other times obfuscating it with electronics. Their voice can still gut you, but they’ve grown more guarded about unleashing it in its rawest state.
One quality that hasn’t changed is the band’s exquisite sense of drama. Patience, Moonbeam is so opulent with strings and splendor it sometimes plays like Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness as rendered on the hangout dramedy scale of The Execution of All Things. This group lives for knockout punches, payoffs that propel songs to the next stratum, and they pack the record dense with them. The moonshine-soaked folk jam “Junior” culminates in singalong euphoria, while “Doom” erupts from its immaculate tension with the album’s heaviest riff and stickiest bridge: “It’s funny how I need you, damn.” For all the album’s tenderness and sentimentality, it might make you want to punch a pillow.
It’s all stunning and sumptuous, and perhaps a tiny bit of a missed opportunity, given the riches of the material. If Patience, Moonbeam doesn’t add up to more than the sum of its many remarkable parts, it’s because it has no central focus, no dominant mood to contrast all of its many other moods against. It’s a collage of striking songs from a band that may have shied away from making some tough calls about what to cut and what to lean into during the long process of self-recording. The hyperpop-inflected “Ladybug” and the DJ-scratched Sneaker Pimps trip-hop homage “Ephemera” are fetching statement pieces, but they stick out like blacklights against the log-cabin twang of “Emma” and “Never Rest.” There’s a reason Conor Oberst didn’t sequence I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning and Digital Ash in a Digital Urn on shuffle.
Still, it would be cruel to deny this band its impassioned little bit of everything, especially when those whims are so reliably rousing. Patience, Moonbeam closes with the only remnant from the band’s scrapped 2020 sessions, “Kid,” a heartbreaker written in the aftermath of a lost pregnancy. Even as the lyrics caution against the temptation to tidy up the pain with a rushed resolution, the band can’t resist softening the sting with consoling George Harrison-esque guitars, communal vocals, and positive thinking: “All dark things in time define their meaning.” When Great Grandpa get an opportunity to comfort, they seize it.
