Grandaddy
Sumday
V2

Grandaddy's 1997 debut, Under the Western Freeway, strummed delicate and charged, earnest pop out of the backwoods of suburban hell. The Sophtware Slump, its follow-up, did likewise, coaxing apocalyptic bliss from idle appliances, and whimsy out of not fitting in. If I could have been responsible for the pretty messes of those albums, I'd gladly live near taco trucks, too.

So, what you really want to know: Does Sumday, the third disc from Modesto, Calif.'s sweet, smarty-pants, robot-loving band, live up to its own Slump? Or hell, to that brilliant debut? Not a chance. But does it really matter?

Sumday finds the band parked in the same lots, but vocalist/guitarist/keyboardist/band-scribe Jason Lytle embraces decay more than ever — and sounds damn happy to do so. Previous outings found Lytle singing to or about machines; earlier songs held dying robots with careful arms. These new tracks, for the most part, find him in the robot seat, singing things like "You humans require more words" in an "Oh, you silly things" kind of way. Sumday boasts cheerful indifference: Go ahead, take my brain! I haven't got one, anyway!

Following the first wind-up toy buzzes and whirs of opener "Now It's On," Sumday is all sums, and they mostly add up to 4/4 in a major key. Now, anyone can love a standard pop song, and certainly anyone who's given to at least occasional toe-tapping can appreciate the swagger of the lackadaisical "The Go in the Go-For-It" and the swing of "Lost on Yer Merry Way" (I can!). But it's not until "Yeah Is What We Had," that Lytle goes behind some of the machinery to reveal his tender cogs for the sap in all of us. Lytle coos, "In this life, will I ever see you again?" with such fragility that we can feel for ourselves the way his very human voice cracks (it's tragic!).

Two tracks later, in "Stray Dog and the Chocolate Shake," it's back to button-cute Grandaddy fare as the song title might suggest, with Lytle jesting about a limo driver "with his weird cologne and his magic hair... it's magic!" But the diversion is slight, making way for standout cut, "O.K. with My Decay," in which the rather upbeat tempo and "doo doo doos" betray the actual desperation of the song. A simple piano melody weaves through Lytle's heartbreaking admission: "I'm OK with my decay/ I have no choice/ I have no voice ... so I rejoice/ I'm OK, I'm OK, I'm OK, I'm OK..." The words themselves are insistent and persuasive, the tone in which they're issued much less so. Within this "I'm OK, but listen to me, I'm really not" tune is the model of furrowed-brow beauty that is Grandaddy's trademark, what makes their pop more than a brief bleep in the collective gush of heart-and-soul cliché.

Of Sumday's 52-odd minutes, Lytle's initial brand of nonchalance might account for the bland, rhythm-by-numbers tempo of the first half. Which isn't to say that Grandaddy has compromised its noggin for less heady endeavors; there are still clever bites packed into the gears. But for every robotic quip on Sumday, there's an exposed moment of sincerity that proves it's not all Penzoil oozing from the lilting Lytle.

— Lavina Lee (lavina at flakmag dot com)