Customer Reviews

Broken Down Comforter Collection

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All this material has been re-issued (and expanded upon) on "Concrete Dunes." So don't pay the import price.

This is a collection of b-sides and ep tracks. Amazing melodies, quirky instrumentation and brilliant visual lyrics makes Grandaddy one of the most interesting American bands around right now. "Kim You Bore Me To Death" will be in your head for days. "Taster" reads like a want ad from a King who has lost all of his royal food tasters to poisoning. Buy it. The price is right for an import.

There's a definite mood running through this one. Best summed up by the sample at the start of the instrumental, 'Fentry'. Two, well hicks is the only word that comes to mind (a man and a woman, man sounds real grizzly) , exchange pleasantries, "sure has been a cold winter" kind of thing. However, it's at the very end of this conversation, where the Grandaddy template is set. The woman stumbles, and the man asks, "can you make it", to which she replies, "yes sah, i kin make it". This undercurrent runs through quite a few of the songs on this record. The mundane conversation representing the mundane life, from which we can escape from through our dreams ("oh to sleep, perchance to dream", from "Levitz").

Not just the mundane but the downtrodden also. "For the Dishwasher" all about a..dishwasher, riding home after his day's work. He is told "it will be alright, just go to sleep tonight", again release through our dreams, the focal point.

Lyttle's lyrics move the listener all the way through. Immediately, following the above couplet, the consolation, "you'll get another chance some day" is offered, adding unbearable poignancy to proceedings.

It also offers an insight into the often child-like and utterly charming insights offered by the band's singer and songperson, Jason Lyttle.

For all the often sentimental value his lyrics hold throughout, the romantic side of things is painted as tragic on the final track and on 'For the Dishwasher' it is firmly rejected - "F**k that subject love". This is beautiful, encapsulating brilliantly the frustration and anger the rejected among us feel.

There are also lighter moments, the opening track, "Gentle Spike Resort", comments on angry teenage punk rockers. There is brilliant wordplay to be found here also. Rightly never favouring the direct approach, Lyttle points out their Whitesnake riffs dressed up like...not Sid Vicious, but Sid Viscosity.

Then there's 'Kim, you bore me to death', the homage to the Pixies. With an absolutely killer Pixiesesque guitar break, and a bizarre narrative concerning Frank Black's? first meeting with Kim. Where she "explains her theory" with her room mate behind her "playing bongos", expertly playing up Kim Deals' suspected kookiness.

Lyrical themes vary wildly elsewhere, with a general sense of sadness underpinning each song. A black heart definetly beats beneath all this. In particular, the hidden track, which concerns Lyttle killing a man "again and again" whom his girl cheated on him for. The fact that all this is set against a traditional rootsy chord progression works well, giving the piece a real confessional feel.

Dark but beautiful music, that manages to transport you to some place else, like all good music should.

..that I'd never heard of this amazing band before until recently. The Broken Down Comforter Collection is an amazing combination of two previous albums (A Pretty Mess By This One Band and Machines Are Not She), which has apparently been re-released yet again as Concrete Dunes.