1) Nonphenomenal Lineage; 2) A.M. 180; 3) Collective Dreamwish of Upperclass Elegance; 4) Summer Here Kids; 5) Laughing Stock; 6) Under the Western Freeway; 7) Everything Beautiful Is Far Away; 8) Poisoned at Hartsy Thai Food; 9) Go Progress Chrome; 10) Why Took Your Advice?; 11) Lawn and So On
Rough and uneven in sound yet with some songs so good they break through it. Still, just a little too underdeveloped.
Key tracks: "A.M. 180", "Summer Here Kids", "Laughing Stock"
You break down Grandaddy's signature sound into some basic concepts and you get a few identifiable elements: the man-meets-technology concept that runs in the background for most of their discography, the production that meshes together intricate detail with a more home-spun aesthetic flirting between lo- and hi-fi, and Jason Lytle's recognisable songwriting. On Under the Western Freeway those goals had already been established, but actually getting there is still shaky. The running concept only appears in infrequent glimpses, the production is unintentionally uneven rather than a genuine stylistic choice (there's a lot of curious mixing imbalances throughout which do not strike me as genuinely considered decisions) and the songs swing wildly from classics to glorified segues. That is to say, Under the Western Freeway sounds like a work in progress: a proof of concept waiting to be fully formed.
To put it in greater detail, compared to the scattershot demos and pre-album EPs compiled in The Broken Down Comforter Collection Lytle and co (but pretty much just Lytle on record) have found a way forward that works for them and they've expanded upon it for the debut full-length record. There's a lot to appreciate in the Grandaddy sound even in its more formative shape and part of that even works to the record's charm: the slight fuzziness of it all meshes wonderfully with the offbeat and somewhat dated synths and keyboard elements show their age in a way that suits the more rustic, slightly slapdash form the band is in here. In fact, compared to the rest of the Grandaddy discography the synths and similar textural elements arguably play a bigger role here than they do later on given how striking some of the sounds used are, whether it's intentional or not: the album even opens up with a particularly memorable synth lead courtesy of the pseudo-intro "Nonphenomenal Lineage" which is a great way to guide into the record. That particular sound preference lends Under the Western Freeway its characteristic tone, slightly weary and out of time with the rest of the world to an even greater degree than most of Lytle's records. It's the one thing that works with the production, given the rest of it is unpolished to a more awkward degree, from indecisive mixing to the general lack of any depth in sound. One of the worst in this regard is "Laughing Stock" where the drums are loudly on the forefront but without any depth to them that the flat snare thuds et al border on distracting. This is not a headphone album in the slightest - there is nothing to gain hearing these songs in even greater fidelity.
"Laughing Stock" still comes out as one of the best songs of the album though and has a good claim to be its unexpected highlight overall; when Lytle stumbles upon a great tune, even this early on he can pull it off to such a good extent that you forgive the occasionally amateurish sound. Lytle's songwriting and arrangements are more straightforward here than in the later albums, as probably expected from a debut, but the tricks he repeats are really good ones. "Laughing Stock" for example is six minutes of roughly the same mid-tempo beat, but Lytle's frail singing against the other elements lends it a strong atmosphere and the simple but powerful chorus clears the haze surrounding the rest of the song. Lytle reaching for the limits of his range as the music picks up gives it that extra necessary oomph. and when the song finally does break out and play loud, it's the kind of classic release of tension that works brilliantly. It's a trick Grandaddy would repeat often throughout their records, with seemingly monotonous passages transformed into something far greater and resonant than expected, and "Laughing Stock" is the progenitor for the others of its ilk, and its chorus and breakdown still play strong. Yes I wish it sounded a lot better than it did, but when it finds those particular magic notes and has them played with gusto, you forgive it for its flaws as you enjoy its strengths.
The same attitude goes for much of the album's peaks, and it certainly has some. The rollicking cult classic "A.M. 180" with its signature keyboard riff is classic Grandaddy in form and tone, and it's no surprise it's become the breakaway hit of the album, encapsuling not only something essential about Lytle but also about the late 90s American musical landscape in general. It's probably an even worse offender in sound than "Laughing Stock" (the vocal mixing is a mess and I swear the drums accidentally mess the beat at one point) but it doesn't prevent it from sounding like an anthem. The high-energy "Summer Here Kids", the other big song with a signature keyboard riff (though a piano this time), is a to-the-point rocker the likes of which Lytle has rarely ever indulged in and certainly not under the Grandaddy name, hinting at a less contemplative and more festival-storming hypothetical direction the band could have moved towards. It's a great, fun cut showing the band at their most guitar-oriented and the fuzziness of the production works actually really well here, complimenting the song's rough guitars and whirlwind nature.
You'll notice these are all songs from the first half of the album, and it's that second half which places Under the Western Freeway in the bottom of the Grandaddy rate list. Lytle isn't particularly conceptual on Under the Western Freeway but an attempt has been made to make it sound like an album that sticks together and where the whole is even greater than the individual parts. Somehow this has realised into a number of filler-esque segues dominating the album's runtime from the title track onwards. Apart from the admittedly quite nice "Everything Beautiful Is Far Away" (with yet more delightfully on-the-nose synths taking over good chunks of the soundscape underneath the chugging rock rhythm), the later section of Under the Western Freeway is made out of short songs which behave like interludes, one after another trying to act like songs that rise up on their own right without having the ground to stand on for it: unless the run of a seemingly improvised pseudo-skit ("Poisoned at Hartsy Thai Food"), a half-raw glorified demo sketch that's over before you realise ("Go Progress Chrome") and a two-minute outro followed by minutes of silence and bird tweeting ("Lawn and So On") somehow sounds like an exciting sequence. "Why Took Your Advice" is the only one that feels like a full song, but it's a really plodding one and in fact is overlong for what it is - a far cry from Grandaddy's future minimalist melancholy stills in time.
It's a really disappointing way to close an album - especially when we're talking about it taking up nearly half the tracklist. The sound issues are one thing, the general underdeveloped tone is another: both are forgivable when you have songs as good as what's around the first half ("Collective Dreamwish of Upperclass Elegance" is fine as well, for what it's worth, just not so fine it jumps out as something that beckons you to the album). In fact, I always feel like I underrate and misjudge this album when I start it because it's easy to get into it when it begins, and the run from the lush synths of "Nonphenomal Lineage" to the shy majesty of "Laughing Stock" has nothing to be ashamed of next to any other record from Lytle and co. Then the songs get shorter, the melodies barely make an appearance and everything starts feeling like an afterthought, and it's like you've hit a shuffle button somewhere and gotten all the filler cuts in a row. Anyone who enjoys Grandaddy - or even this music scene or period as a whole - will likely find a lot to appreciate on Under the Western Freeway, but it's nonetheless a limping first attempt that hasn't yet figured out how to run with the ideas and concepts it's got in its mind. It's a demo or a beta, to run with the technology analogies that would soon start to crop up all over the group's lyrics, though to its credit even these unfinished basics make it obvious there'd be great things ahead.
