Music ‘06
It’s after Thanksgiving, so here goes!
I did a lot better job than last year at keeping up with music. But my tastes are what they are, so if you know me, you might not be surprised by anything I list here. So it goes. I will say, though, that I’ve got a solid List of Ten for 2006; I’ll stand by this one.
(EDIT: PJ is off galavanting around this week, so I’ll put together the BSR Thursday show from this list.)
1. Grandaddy, Just Like the Fambly Cat. It might not be possible to understand where this band was coming from unless you followed the arc their 10-year career. Basically, Jason Lytle and his band spent 4 1/2 albums playing out an extended space-country-rock saga. Their topic? Escaping from suburban Modesto, California to someplace deep in the mountains. Lytle explored the tension between the two environments in weird songs about animals and appliances living together in peace (“Broken Household Appliance National Forest”) and bewildered corporate execs on nature retreats (“The Group Who Couldn’t Say”).
On Fambly Cat, Lytle finally stops hesitating and pulls the trigger: he breaks up the band and moves to a nice spot in Montana. Much of the album sounds wide-open and optimistic (downright cinematic, in fact), but the best songs (”Summer…It’s Gone,” “Rear View Mirror,” “Guide Down Denied”) reveal just a little bit of anxiety and sadness for the life that’s being abandoned. But… like the cat who just decides one day to start living somewhere else, Grandaddy has moved on.
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