This is one of those entirely pleasant but strangely nondescript albums. It starts off brightly enough, with the sprightly "Now It's On", but from thereon in, things settle all too quickly into a chugging groove of spacey, samey modern rockisms, tracks 2 through to 7 mostly blurring into one undifferentiated mass (only "El Caminos In The West" really stands out a little bit with its relaxed, driving on a highway tunefulness). Things then pick up a bit near the end of the record with "Stray Dog And The Chocolate Shake" which, while a bit cutesy and simplistic for me, at least promises some kind of difference; it's followed by "O.K. With My Decay", which is genuinely nice (a nice shade of pale blue, streaked with apricot and end-of-day sky pink, say, by contrast to most of the album, which is just kind of grey-mauveishly laidback), and then "The Warming Sun", which is the best song on the album and at last really brings the pretty, after which there's only "The Final Push To The Sum", a decent closer.
Sumday is my first Grandaddy album; don't know whether it'll also prove to be the last (apparently The Sophtware Slump is the one to get, which I can believe given the songs from it which I've heard). The band is quite 'of the moment', I think (well, the moment of a few years back, anyway) - I hear bits of latter-day Mercury Rev and Flaming Lips in them, and the Polyphonic Spree also seem to be musical fellow voyagers - but, on the evidence of Sumday, Grandaddy don't quite seem to have whatever's needed to really stand out from the pack.
