Just Like The Fambly Cat is Grandaddy’s swansong album, the band having announced their impending split earlier this year. The group’s recording career reached its pinnacle on their 2000 release The Sophtware Slump, an album that tested the listener’s patience with its prog theatrics, but still contained enough sublime country spacepop to be one of the year’s best.
Grandaddy reined in their ambitions considerably on 2003’s Sumday — a rather one-paced collection of chugging power pop, which amounted to little more than 12 re-writes of the Slump track ‘Hewlett’s Daughter’. They’ve broadened their focus again on Fambly Cat though, (re-)embracing a much wider range of moods and textures, without offering anything drastically different to their previous work.
‘Summer…It’s Gone’ covers similar ground to Grandaddy’s last record, until an unexpected, crackling mid-section announces the group’s return to more adventurous sonic territory.
They take it further out from there, too. ‘Rear View Mirror’ is a modern update of Roy Orbison’s ‘I Drove All Night’, filled with static and turbulence, and spruced up with an uncharacteristically pomp-rock guitar solo. ‘The Animal World’ mines similar territory to French soundsmiths M83, swirling ambience that threatens to morph into rock opera, and filled with Grandaddy’s by-now-signature keyboard squiggles.
‘Skateboarding Saves Me Twice’ is a joyous slice of fuzzy, Wilson-esque summer pop, while ‘50%’ throws a nod to the group’s more shambolic pre-Slump days – 63 seconds of breakneck, melodic garage noise.
“I don’t wanna work all night and day/On writing songs that make the young girls cry/I just wanna elevate myself,” croons singer Jason Lytle on ‘Elevate Myself’, giving the most obvious lyrical reference to the group’s demise. Over and out.