Grandaddy
Under The Western Freeway

THE REVIEW

One of the American indie peaks of the '90s (release year 1997), one of those 5-6 albums that define a hypermodern melancholy, indeed suggest the indissoluble union between progress-at-all-costs and alienation, not just a rock whine then, 24-karat low fidelity, very Coupland-like in its existentialist stride. A weird and intense album, the most spontaneous and perhaps immediate of the group, lived on the edge of an alien and ancient poetic together, the skewed folk of American indie youth combined with Kraftwerk's experiments, frequent Kraftwerkian games on robotic tunes ("A.M 180"; "Everything Beautiful I Far Away"), background noise, interference and creaks, broken beat, low fidelity, all elevated to a stylistic hallmark, this is the album a young Neil Young would make grappling with the synthetic and digital chaos of the end of the millennium, someone indeed described this album as the tonight’s the night of the cyber era. The spirit is strongly indie, "Collective Dreamwish Of Upperclass Elegance" is a peak of muffled atmosphere, melancholy suspended on a secobarbital cosmic whistle on which traditional rock instruments are grafted and the voice afflicted by too many depressive listens of the slacker generation, result: anxiety galore, altitude instability and air shifts, an alienating and charming piece that is found several times in the rest of the album. By the mid-90s hybridizing "is the reason": "Summer Here Kids" is Pavement + Sparklehorse, while vintage keyboards and many digital-zen sounds accompany “Go Progress Chrome”, note in "Laughing Stock" the frequent robotic inlays in man-machine style on a perfect pop-rock song with melodies worthy of the early REM.

There is a smell of psychotropic drugs in these tracks, folk ballads soaked in indietronica that beat hypnotically a feeble anguish and a tenacious weakness, these are songs imbued with a sense of sweet psychic paralysis (the fragile benzodiazepine sadness of "Why Took You Advice"), of autumnal summers (“Lawn & So On” concluded by the chirping of crickets on a midsummer night), of noise punk fervor and shabby rage à la Pavement.