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Yours Truly is more cohesive than many of those past albums, a comforting hybrid of west coast beauty and stark, isolationist expanse that bodes well for his solo career.
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Alternative PressThe haunting tone unfurls itself further with every successive listen, making this an album worth returning to again and again. [June 2009, p.102]
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To say Yours Truly is stuck in Grandaddy territory isn’t exactly a dig; that band produced four consistently solid records, and it turns out Lytle is as competent on his own as he is with friends
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Yours Truly, The Commuter, Lytle's solo debut, is a sweetly sad collection of fuzzed-out odes to frustration (the bouncy title track) and furry friends.
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FilterWhile he doesn't exude happiness throughout all 12 tracks, there's a feeling of contentment with his newfound solitude. Clearly, Lytle's time away has recharged him, even if it's in a way that reflects a more mellow life. [Spring 2009, p.92]
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His voice is as yearning and creaky as ever, at once aged and childlike, and if the music doesn't always have a lot of weight, Lytle's songwriting remains pleasantly distracting on the surface and thoughtfully sublime upon closer inspection.
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MojoThe record's familarity is nourishing rather than revelatory. [Jun 2009, p.99]
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His spectral vocals comfort like new bedsheets, lyrics straddle tranquillity and loss (‘Ghost Of My Old Dog’) and there are enough sun-over-hill-moments (‘Brand New Sun’) that hold their own against his Snowdon-high standards.
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The tunes remain pleasantly unhurried, lush and laid-back but fail to stimulate. His small, fragile voice now seems slightly whiny and affected.
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As with previous albums, Yours Truly benefits from creative sequencing that winks at expectations.
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By not moving further away from the sound that defined him, instead choosing to use that sound as a blanket, retreating within it rather than escaping, Lytle shows us that the commuter is still trying to find his way home.
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With this album, Lytle has established himself as a solo artist who does not so much distance himself from his previous band as successfully scratch an itch for sounds that have been missing from the music landscape for quite some time.
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Q MagazineIt's all overly familiar in the most reassuring way. [Jun 2009, p.125]
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Commuter may be a welcome return of an idiosyncratic talent, but it also finds Lytle a bit too stuck in his own head to stand alongside Grandaddy's most challenging, accomplished albums.
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Yours Truly occasionally provides pummeling feedback rock ('It's the Weekend'), but when Lytle's lullaby vocals suggest, "You should hold my hand / While everything blows away / And we'll run to a brand-new sun," it's like Bruce Springsteen's open highway finally reached a melancholy kid from Modesto.
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Lytle settles for repetitive mood-setters that merely re-shuffle the elements he’s been working with for more than a decade now, with no discernible progress or mastery.
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The music simply crawls by in a maddeningly static mid-tempo blur, going about its melancholy business on the way to nowhere.
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It’s a fragile recollection of California rock from more auspicious times, with stately melodies and vocal chorales over jerry-built foundations: elegies for vanished certainties.
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Although Commuter is nearly musically indistinguishable from a Grandaddy record, it feels comforting to have Lytle back, to hear him working through his issues with new music.
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UncutThere is the odd suggestion here of a campfire Mercury Rev, but nothing to spook former fans. [Jun 2009, p.92]
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Under The RadarThis album cherry-picks a lot of the best ideas from his past work and sets a new baseline, which will simultaneously please fans of his old band and allow him to vault into the future. [Spring 2009, p.66]
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Under The RadarWhile Commuter for all intents and purposes revisits that same territory, it seems the well has begun to run dry as much of the album sounds like half-baked leftovers. [Spring 2009, p.66]
User score distribution:
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Positive: 7 out of 7
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Mixed: 0 out of 7
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Negative: 0 out of 7
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FlubbyBMay 25, 2009
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discombobulatorMay 21, 2009