Grandaddy - Elevate Myself

(V2, 2006)

This is a night for high horses, people, because after nearly three years of procrastination I have finally gotten around to sorting and alphabetizing my many, many loose 7”s. No more will I buy second copies of singles, erroneously thinking I don’t already own them. No more will I live the shame of April 16, 2008, when I skipped over a Captain Kangaroo 45 because it was stashed in a forgotten pile somewhere, thus jumping from a review of Camphor to a review of the Carbonas – like an idiot. No more will I wonder how many different editions of “Hi Hi Hi” b/w “C Moon” I possess (six, unless there are more in my office). Hooray and so forth!

In celebration, I’ll think first about the brief B-side of this single, which is appropriately (FOR ME) titled “Winners!” As the last song on the last-ever Grandaddy release, it’s amusing in its conspicuously angry, tuff-guitar fuckoffitude (harkening back somewhat to earlier records), but Grandaddy was far better at doing ‘sad’ than ‘aggressive,’ so whatever satisfaction there is here comes more from naughty giggles at the song’s status as a semi-effective middle-finger of a goodbye than as an actual listening experience. Is potentially good for beerblasts, at least. Main attraction “Elevate Myself,” offa Just Like the Fambly Cat, is more of the same ol’ tech-freaked curmudgeonliness that the group’d been mining for the past three albums, very much in the spiritual vein of (though poppier than) previous uptempo A-sides like “Crystal Lake” and “El Caminos in the West”… both of which – hey!! – I happen to enjoy. Lookit, I can’t say that Grandaddy ever progressed too far after the musical polevault that was The Sophtware Slump, but the band did maintain an always-high-qual and sweetly melancholic synth-daubed pop that consistently topped contempo-chums like Sparklehorse and those loathsome Eels. There’s a rich, ELO-esque sheen to their later work, and both The Sophtware Slump and Sumday sound like the shoulda-existed musical bridges between the lush sugarfix of The Soft Bulletin and the digital oddness of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. A comp is definitely in order down the road. Fellas don’t get the respect they deserve, so won’t YOU be the one to take the first steps toward providing it?