Grandaddy – Just Like The Fambly Cat

The second-most-famous indie-rock outfit ever to come out of California’s Central Valley, Grandaddy spent several years as a band on the verge (and then, even worse, several more years as a band probably not on the verge) before recently deciding to call it quits. Their probable swan song is patchwork of space rock, retro pop, faux-hard rock, proto-prog and just about every other musical styling the band managed to get around to during their decade-plus existence.

For all its genre skipping, Just Like The Fambly Cat is a good deal less loopy and more personable than Grandaddy’s 2000 misshapen masterwork The Sophtware Slump, with less fuzzed-out jams and more compact almost-rock tracks (like the great “Jeez Louise”) to occasionally kick things into life. The record-opening “What Happened…” features a disembodied child’s voice asking, over and over, “What happened to the family cat?” It’s meant to be spooky and precocious, but it’s possibly the most irritating two minutes ever committed to disc.

Almost inevitably, things look up after that. The band does a more than decent job with the woozy instrumentals (“Skateboarding Saves Me Twice”) that have long been Grandaddy’s bread and butter, but the dreamy, sad ballads that crop up throughout are the true keepers. “Summer…It’s Gone” (“Summer is gone and now it’s clear/That no one is showing up here”) and the hidden last track “Shangri-La (Outro)” are depressing and inscrutable and perfectly lovely. For Grandaddy, it’s tough to think of a more fitting elegy.