was on the phone to Jason Lytle the other day *breathes on nails, polishes them on skanky shirt*, and despite being barely sentient and suffering from a hangover from Hades, he said Sumday was their best album yet. I think he's probably right.


Among the chimney stacks and green pastures of the UK, we feel we have to plonk Grandaddy down in the weirdly elegant electro-symphonic indie category along with Mercury Rev, The Flaming Lips and Super Furry Animals, with Lambchop sometimes impinging on the borders. Yet this is a good thing, at least for the bands themselves. It means we'll lavish pretentious and outlandish words like 'beautiful' and 'transcendent' on it, making it a given that we think the album is not only good but great. I suppose it's a form of unconditional love, or perhaps charity. Their voluminous beards and jiving bears add the cherries on top.


From the off Sumday grips your attention. “Now It's On” is pure barnstormer. After the red herrings of the electric buzz and Cornelius-like speech inserts at the beginning, the song goes large on the escapist lyrics and crashing guitar chords, signalling that the band means business. However something's odd. Could this be happiness or some sort of awful bliss? I've always detected this overpowering sense of dread underneath Grandaddy's sonorous exterior, from the glum opener “He's Simple, He's Dumb, He's The Pilot” on The Sophtware Slump to any number of their musings on the nature of future technology or pictures of smashed keyboards (which only ever made me think of computer centre dumpsters). It sure wasn't warm and fuzzy is all I'm saying. However on Sumday the mood has been turned upside down: stoicism displacing the fear.


There's still the aching sadness that becomes all the more apparent when Lytle's sweet, delicate timbre comes to the fore on songs like the Flaming Lips-like chunter of “I'm On Standby” and the dip into the Coyne falsetto of “Lost On Your Merry Way”, but it's generally more amiable (sorry, couldn't think of a better way to put it). There's a sense of soaring hope even when Lytle sings 'El Caminos in the West, All collapsed and futureless, I'll paint the words a simple wish, for peace of mind and happiness', because it sounds just so darn chirpy.


There's certainly no letting go of some obsessions, on “Stray Dog and The Chocolate Shake” there's more canine and robot wibblings set to that cheap electronic moan we've come to expect of them, but then it's a return to the changed Grandaddy on “O.K. With My Decay”, the line: “I'm O.K. with my decay, I have no choice, I have no voice, I have no say, On my decay, I have no choice, so I rejoice”, pretty much summing up the album's mindset in a nutshell. To the sound of a semi-epic blissed-out soundscape that could be Jason Pierce finding some happy pills at the back of his medicine cabinet, Grandaddy confirm they've accepted the future shock and the existential pangs, and can at least get on with the business of living our lives. After all what's the point in worrying about the inevitable? Sumday is bursting with life. Grab it with both hands.