The second solo album since Lytle folded his band Grandaddy six years ago is 50 glorious minutes of meticulous melody and homespun charm.
Jason Lytle
Dept Of Disappearance
Epitaph £12.99
Star rating: * * * *
It was constructed in his customised studio, melding synthesisers and strings into a sumptuous sound. It can be agonisingly beautiful, as on Somewhere There’s A Someone, where a heart breaks on every beat, Lytle’s vocal like Neil Young at his most plaintive.
On Your Final Setting Sun, John Barry’s Theme From The Persuaders is eaten up by an arcade game and spewed out as an ELO tune.
Young Saints truly sets the bar, a gently elastic piece of electronica “out cold on indie and ambient”, as Lytle intones over percolating percussion. The relationship with Mercury Rev’s Deserter’s Songs is at its closest on this spacey song, on which Lytle sings with a similar vulnerability to that band’s Jonathan Donahue, syllables teased out like warm toffee to their chewy breaking point.
Hangtown presents the view from the top of the tree, coloured by the anticipation of rope burn eclipsing all else, sweetened by a woozy mouth harp solo.
A lovingly disciplined record to warm you against the winter chill, this remains a saccharine-free zone, enchanting and entrancing. Could it be melodic shoegazing’s last stand?
• Download this: Young Saints, Your Final Setting Sun