Once again, Grandaddy travel down the familiar road of attaching a human face on technology for the sole purpose of denouncing it. In a shockingly ironic way, Sumday's pleasant, mid-tempo/mid-range vocal melodies and soothing rhythms make it ideal music for programming. With lines like "I'm wondering if I'll ever know/if I'll be better than I was before/when I surface through the service door," and "I got good at saying I gotta go /number one at I don't know/but from the stories that I heard/you humans require more words," both from "I'm on Standby," programming majors almost feel guilty listening to it while crafting car wash sims with queue class functions. Almost. This album is absolutely too good to put down.
Sumday kicks off with the instantly catchy "Now It's On," and for five more tracks, the album uses the same staccato rhythms laced with sixteenth notes over and over. While the similarities are noticeable, the listener won't care because each song is still very solid and unique. After about a half an hour of this, the album then takes an odd turn and divides the vinylites and Cdphiles right down the middle. For the people listening to the CD, they hear a sprawling and somewhat-unwanted change of pace in "Yeah is What We Had." For those with the vinyl, this kicks off the second side and, well, they were probably expecting some kind of change in the first place. Bottom line is the song will ruin a driving or gaming session if your skip button is broken or out-of-reach.
Next are probably some of the best tracks on the album, "Stray Dog and the Chocolate Shake," which is brilliantly built around a melody that sounds like something a high-school marching band would use for warmups, the cringerifically-titled but still excellent "OK With My Decay," "The Warming Sun" which features some great piano melodies that remind me of some songs from Abbey Road (disregarding the fact that it has two songs with "Sun" in the title), and the very satisfactory closer "The Final Push to the Sum."
If you're programming while listening to it, just make sure your program isn't smart enough to bite off your face and you'll be fine.
