Album: Grandaddy

Sumday, V

"Guess who lost the go in the go-for-it," muses Jason Lytle wearily in "The Go in the Go-For-It", one of several songs on Sumday reflecting the growing pressures felt by a band rapidly en route from cult item to full-fledged star status. The same concern is there in coded fashion in "The Group Who Couldn't Say", a Tom Petty-esque tale of a reluctant hit band drained by their workload but finding redemption in bucolic bliss. It's not hard to discern a band of shy, retiring rural types torn between the desire to succeed and the conflicting desire to remain unknown; so while the album opens with eyes fixed on the future in the uplifting "Now It's On", it's not long before a countermanding acceptance of entropy is voiced in "OK With My Decay". It's almost as if Grandaddy wanted to retire to the country cottage to "get themselves together" in time-honoured hippy manner, but before they've actually fallen apart. Not that that point might be too far distant, judging by the band's touchingly ingenuous sleevenote, which ends, "Hopefully we won't get too fed up with the music business and we can continue this relationship with you all for a good long time". Sumday is full of such ruminations on the uncertainties of life, from the procrastinating narrator of "I'm On Standby", and the couple drifting apart in "Saddest Vacant Lot in All the World", to Lytle's reflections upon how celebrity might affect his life in "The Final Push To The Sum", where droning organ and shimmering cymbals underscore the query, "If my old life is done/ Then what have I become?". Good question. Good album, too.