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GRANDADDY has passed away, and death was neither quick nor painless.
Instead, the demise of the 13-year-old indie-pop quintet from Modesto -- whose quirky, wide-eyed psych-tronica won critics' hearts but not enough music buyers' ears -- came after a long illness visited by drug and alcohol abuse, by dashed hopes and financial struggle, by long periods of uncomfortable silence and by wounds that festered in a town to which the band felt inextricably tied. Finally, in December, the group's auteur, Jason Lytle, announced that this model of the music business was not for him. He pulled the plug.
"To continue would have been to parade around a smelly corpse," says Lytle, 36, making the rounds this spring in V2 Records' attempt to drum up interest in Grandaddy's fourth and final album, "Just Like the Fambly Cat," released this month. Even that foray exemplified the disconnect between industry and artist -- Lytle, a blue-collar guy who travels with his mountain bike and camping gear, was arranged a room in a tony West Hollywood hotel.
It might seem equally contradictory to give so much lip service to what amounts to a posthumous release were not "Fambly Cat" -- and the admittedly tortured artist who made it -- so compelling.
Grandaddy's farewell note is penned in crashing guitars, swirling keyboards and Lytle's boyish falsetto, musically focused while wavering between hope and resignation, pain and exhilaration, staying and leaving. It's an inferiority complex turned inside out, its sweet melodies anesthetizing the exposed nerves.
"It's about reflection, acceptance and closure," says Lytle, as if it couldn't have been about anything else.
The seeds of Grandaddy's inevitable doom...