Grandaddy - Last Place

Grandaddy are back, with a new album and a tour and both events are highly welcome. Their new record, Last Place doesn't re-invent their particular wheel by any means, (it just does what we know this band are outstandingly good at anyway), but this is not something you'd want them to try to do anyhow. Having created a genuine classic, with their 2000 offering The Sophtware Slump, versions and refinements on the ideas and sounds on that would more than do and on first listenings, Last Place more than delivers on that promise.

Grandaddy are all about modern estrangement, (alienation somehow doesn't seem an adequate term for this anymore), and they do this strange, warm detachment thing as well as anybody. They're a band I've grown to love more over the years and I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling this way, their juxtaposition of kitsch and lyrical yearning for something that can't quite be named becomes more alluring with every passing year. A sense that technology and the advances it has made has somehow left us in cosmic limbo, unsure anymore of how to relate to the world around us properly anymore.

Last Place is a very strong set of songs indeed, with several that would slot in just fine on their aforementioned masterpiece. They take you to different places at once. With The Boat is in the Barn for example locating you in an agrarian American location that we're familiar with, even if we haven't visited it ourselves, while also voicing that strange modern anxiety that we're all subject too. A wonderful record and one I'm sure to come back to again and again over the coming year.