Last Place

It’s sentimental, it’s oddball and it’s beautiful. In other words, it’s Grandaddy at their finest.

It's a subtler and darker sibling to The Sophtware Slump or Just Like The Fambly Cat. [Apr 2017, p.30]

Lytle remains adept at worming his weary melodies into the hidden folds of broken hearts, and through a bit of grin-and-shrug relation, can take aim at the enigmatic roots of a dangerous generation with little more than three chords.

The songs rock and are well written and that’s enough.

A welcome return that’s more solid than it should be, yet less varied than you might hope.

It makes for a diverse album within the tight framework that Lytle operates in, and even if it could have been a solo album just as easily, it works as a Grandaddy album too. If not quite as compelling overall as their best work like Sophtware Slump, it's a worthy successor to the very good Just Like the Fambly Cat and a welcome return for the "band."

Grandaddy is no longer a detached soundtrack hovering over life, it's articulating within it, and we are getting it in a whole new way.

It may be over a decade since their last album, but when Last Place chugs into life with Why We Won’t, it feels as if Grandaddy haven’t aged a day.

Last Place is more sophisticated and less self-consciously wacky than some of the Californians’ previous releases, and better for it.

He wields with sumptuous beauty, from the Floyd-like swathes of mellotron and piano carrying “The Boat Is In The Barn” and the stately “Lost Machine”, to the implacable electropop fizz of “Evermore”.

The band is categorically known for their disciplined uniformity, an approach that gives the band more room to inject more personality into their straightforward rhythm section; seeing as the indie rock landscape has also considerably changed, it’s actually a welcome throwback that’s aged well.

A collection that isn’t going to win over the world but might just help you make more sense out of it.

Last Place is the work of a reenergized band that’s clearly benefited from its extended downtime, even if its overarching mood hardly reflects it.

Last Place is a fittingly contented throwback/possible farewell.

With his piano, classical flourishes and superbly layered production a la E.L.O., it’s out of sync but, when it works, wonderfully so. Whether Lytle’s vocals work for you or not will probably be the main deciding factor as to whether the band itself works for you. Oftentimes he smooths out the edges, but his singing can come across as whiny.

Last Place is an occasionally misty-eyed but very welcome return. A broken but pretty mess.

Self-aware and refined, fifth album Last Place--the first in 11 years--is astonishingly solid.

Both in the lyrical themes and in its sound, we are floating in familiar space. [May 2017, p.104]

Last Place is anachronistically introverted, and its tech references don’t quite make sense in the context of 2017. If it’s understood as a more human album then it works, but it is held back a little by the vestiges of the earlier, broken down and burnt out, Grandaddy.

They sound exhausted, right where we left them.

Ultimately, though, for all its emotional tug, Last Place is solid rather than spectacular, with nothing quite matching the peaks of their first two albums.

There’s a sense that nobody’s heart was quite in it which sometimes means proceedings drag on, refusing to invent, refusing to accept that Granddady can be a band who make it. It’s heart-breaking and at times powerfully so, but it also shuns the listener, forcing them to a place where Grandaddy risk drifting once more into obscurity.

On Last Place, the band returns to the same well again, and while there is enough here to sustain some nostalgia, that well seems drier than ever before.