Album Of The Week: Great Grandpa Patience, Moonbeam

Few bands make me appreciate the minute details of writing and recording music like Great Grandpa. The Seattle-founded quintet is now spread across the map, from Denmark to California, and their music has become nearly as expansive and topologically diverse. Patience, Moonbeam, their first album in over five years, explodes with ideas, perspectives, sensations. It's a huge, often complex record. Yet so many of its finest moments are founded on utterly simple structures, adjusted just so — reminders of how the right arrangements, production, and performance can turn the basic building blocks of music into something breathtaking.

This is a real "duh"-grade epiphany, but it's one I keep having with every spin through Patience, Moonbeam. Like, assembling some chord changes, melodies, and lyrics and stylizing them with your choice of instruments and effects — that's the whole game. That's popular music. It's what literally every artist does when they make a song. But not many artists make that process feel like magic. Great Grandpa keep renewing my wide-eyed amazement at the way all those ingredients can cohere into something greater than the sum of its parts.

You know that outmoded conventional wisdom that all the best songs can be played on an acoustic guitar? It's not a standard that holds up to much scrutiny — not if you love hip-hop, jazz, or, like, any music that prioritizes rhythm first and foremost — but for what it's worth, most of the tracks on Patience, Moonbeam absolutely pass that old acoustic guitar test. The glory of the album is the way this unit blows those campfire songs out to the scale of the horizon, making intimate, heartfelt expressions feel both deeply human and gorgeously alien all at once.

If you've heard Four Of Arrows, Great Grandpa's masterful 2019 LP, you probably already have some sense of what I'm talking about. On that album, guided by a mantra of "go slow, big choices," an ostensible emo band with '90s slacker vibes exploded beyond the boundaries of genre, launching carefully orchestrated bursts of beauty into the gulf between folk-pop and post-rock. They seemed to be harnessing not just one person's tender yearning but a whole community's, funneling a roaring cauldron of emotion into refined, gargantuan swells. To an extent, it sounded like a group of plucky underdogs had tapped into latent superpowers and joined forces to vanquish an army of encroaching dark forces from across the universe. Yet the songs were ultimately about earthbound concerns — "forgiveness, vulnerability, partnership, and mental illnesses," as Nina Corcoran put it in a profile of Great Grandpa at the time.

Patience, Moonbeam expands on the Four Of Arrows template. The songs feel bigger, richer, and more varied, often buoyed by orchestral strings by Abby Gunderson and Jeremiah Moon or pedal steel from Nick Levine (Jodi, ex-Pinegrove). Everything that was great about the band is still great, but they try some new things, and those work out fabulously too. Multi-instrumentalist Pat Goodwin, who was Great Grandpa's creative driving force at first, was already beginning to split songwriting duties with his bandmates on Four Of Arrows. The process of expanded collaboration continues here, and it's still bearing fruit.

All five members penned lyrics: spouses Pat and Caroline Goodwin (bass), lead singer Al Menne, multi-instrumentalist Dylan Hanwright, and drummer Cam LaFlam. Menne, fresh off their debut solo album, wrote the music and lyrics for "Kiss The Dice" and "Top Gun," songs that steer Great Grandpa closer toward the mirage-like singer-songwriter fare of boygenius and their ilk. (Tell me you can't imagine a trembling Phoebe Bridgers' reading of the line "Saw your mom at Sam's Club.") LaFlam authored "Ephemera," a voyage into the realm of trip-hop drum machines and chilled-out atmospherics that reminds me of the Marías. All of these stylistic excursions remain in step with the band's more bombastic, rock-oriented moments thanks to the throughline of Menne's vocals (which have taken on some of the otherworldly qualities of Jeremy Enigk) and shared aesthetic point of view that seems to transcend genre exercises.

Even within the music written by Pat Goodwin, there are flashes of so many different kinds of splendor. The gang vocals on "Ladybug" are straight out of a basement punk show, but the same enthusiastic chorale takes on the twee flavor of early Sufjan Stevens or Los Campesinos! on grand finale "Kid." The grungy acoustic chords of "Emma" evoke Alex G's eerie homespun indie-pop, while so many of the album's larger-than-life climactic moments call back to the galactic catharsis of The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die. Menne's vocals at the end of "Task" are almost like a hyperpop approach to Big Thief-style indie Americana. "Doom" begins as solemn chamber music before venturing into Radiohead-ish art-rock; then a warped, distorted churn; then, at last, a triumphant power ballad.

In so many of these moments, I'm struck by how much graceful wonder Great Grandpa have kicked up over top of a fundamentally basic foundation. They aren't reinventing the wheel, just constructing something gorgeous and unique with a wealth of common ingredients, whether that means landing on just the right fuzzy texture for the guitar strums on "Kiss The Dice" or ratcheting up the tension with a startling chord change in the "Ladybug" pre-chorus. It's a fitting approach for songs that explore the tangled complexities of interpersonal connection.

Often, like works of stage and screen, Great Grandpa's lyrics paint scenes and leave listeners to make sense of the story. Not every one is a mystery to be pondered; "Task," for instance, is about learning how to support a friend through a gender transition, and "Top Gun" seems to address a friend haunted by grief and guilt. But "Junior," a story about a conflict breaking out when the family dog escapes the yard and attacks the neighbor's pigs, leaves a lot open to interpretation. Songs like "Doom" and "Emma" pile up vivid images that are bound to catalyze a reaction even if you can't decode them.

That's how it goes with this band. Every twist contributes to an exhilarating, overwhelming whole. The pieces are assembled carefully, expertly, in ways that trigger the listener's own memories of mourning, longing, and elation. Nothing feels left to chance, but not a stifled, suffocating way. There are bands that cut to your core by doing away with nuance and prioritizing raw, messy immediacy. On a Great Grandpa album, the littlest details are arrayed in service of the biggest feelings.

Patience, Moonbeam is out 3/28 on Run For Cover.

Great Grandpa - Patience, Moonbeam [Blue Vinyl]

21.49

Amazon

Other albums of note out this week:
• Lucy Dacus' Forever Is A Feeling
• Destroyer's Dan's Boogie
• Deafheaven's Lonely People With Power
• Perfume Genius' Glory
• SPELLLING's Portrait Of My Heart
• Hannah Cohen’s Earthstar Mountain
• Backxwash's ONLY DUST REMAINS
• Dean Wareham's That’s The Price Of Loving Me
• The Darkness' Dreams On Toast
• Lil Yachty's Paid In Full
• Lil Durk's Deep Thoughts
• Agriculture member Dan Meyer's Kneeling
• James Elkington's Pastel De Nada
• Eiko Ishibashi's Antigone
• Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals' A City Drowned In God's Black Tears
• Alison Krauss & Union Station's Arcadia
• Real Bad Man & Willie The Kid's Midnight
• Will Smith's Based On A True Story
• Free Range's Lost & Found
• Mumford & Sons' Rushmere
• Little Dragon singer Yukimi's For You
• Snapped Ankles’ Hard Times Furious Dancing
• Bryan Ferry & Amelia Barratt's Loose Talk
• Population II's Maintenant Jamais
• Jessie Reyez's Paid In Memories
• Dead Meadow's Voyager To Voyager
• CocoRosie's Little Death Wishes
• Carlos Santana's Sentient
• Arch Enemy's Blood Dynasty
• Serebii's Dime
• Somebody’s Child's When Youth Fades Away
• Ricky Byrd's NYC Made
• Peter Capaldi's Sweet Illusions
• Memphis May Fire's Shapeshifter
• Mark Morand's 32 Bars Volume 2
• Sick Puppies' Wave The Bull
• Fusilier's Ambush
• Doomsday's Never Known Peace
• poptropicaslutz!'s the new 925
• Korine's A Flame In The Dark
• Sandwell District's End Beginnings
• Janiva Magness' Back For Me
• Joe Armon-Jones' All The Quiet (Part I)
• Butcher Brown’s Letters From The Atlantic
• (T-T)b's Beautiful Extension Cord
• OHYUNG's You Are Always On My Mind
• Bria Salmena's Big Dog
• Sam Akpro's Evenfall
• Alien Weaponry's Te Rā
• The Tumblers' Tangerine
• girlpuppy's Sweetness
• Don Airey's Pushed To The Edge
• Telepathy's Transmissions
• Apparitions' Volcanic Reality
• Palmyra's Restless
• Niis's Niis World
• Orchards' Bicker
• Yetsuby's 4EVA
• Bag People's Bag People
• Cactus Lee's Cactus Lee
• Dawn After Dawn's Home is Where You Are
• Jivebomb's Ethereal
• Branford Marsalis' Belonging
• Use Knife's État Coupable
• Aya's Hexed!
• Maya Delilah's The Long Way Round
• The Devils' Devil’s Got It
• Sacred Paws' Jump Into Life
• Underoath's The Place After This One
• VÍZ's Danse Des Larmes
• Somebody's Child's When Youth Fades Away
• Whitney Johnson & Lia Kohl's For Translucence
• Ministry's The Squirrely Years Revisited
• Nemzzz's RENT'S DUE
• Susto Stringband's Susto Stringband: Volume 1
• Chloe Moriondo's Oyster
• The Warriors' Burn Yourself Alive
• Half Gringa's Cosmovisión
• Aqyila's Falling Into Place
• NYX's NYX
• Joeboy's Viva Lavida
• Dog Ears' Dog Ears V
• Kevin Koplar's To A Better Dark
• Adam Sherman's Nowhere But Here
• Nav's OMW2 REXDALE
• Lord Sko's PIFF
• Izaskun González's Una Ballena / A Whale Soundtrack
• Ariana Grande's eternal sunshine deluxe: brighter days ahead
• Steve Reich's Steve Reich Collected Works Box Set
• Robert Hunter's Tiger Rose (50th Anniversary Editions)
• GUM & Ambrose Kenny-Smith's Ill Times (Deluxe)
• Nothing More's Carnal (Deluxe)
• Primal Scream's Come Ahead: The Remixes Vol 1 (Vocals)
• Mick Harvey & Amanda Acevedo's Golden Mirrors (The Uncovered Sessions Vol. 1)
• Marvin Gaye's Marvin Gaye Live!: Deluxe Edition
• Sleaford Mods' Tied Up In The Bodega live album
• Photay's Windswept: Expansions
• Unrest’s Perfect Teeth 30th Anniversary Edition
• DJ Python's i was put on this earth EP
• Wallows' MORE EP
• Medium Build's takeaways EP
• Maddie Zahm's the angry part EP
• p-rallel's Can’t Be Me EP
• Bellzzz's Dear Elizabeth EP
• Teens In Trouble's Live In Phoenix! EP
• Anna St. Louis' Home Recordings EP
• Loren Kramar's Living Legend EP
• Noonzy's Puppies EP
• Awksymoron's Ollie EP
• Shurr Jr.'s Red Shelter EP
• Amenra's De Toorn & With Fang And Claw EPs
• Bagdad's They Don’t Know EP