Jason Lytle - Yours Truly, The Commuter Review

In 2006, after a decade-plus fronting Cali dream-pop miserabilists Grandaddy, bearded skateboard aficionado Jason Lytle broke up his group and hightailed it to Montana. Yet big-sky country hasn't changed him much: Yours Truly, The Commuter, Lytle's solo debut, is a sweetly sad collection of fuzzed-out odes to frustration (the bouncy title track) and furry friends (''Ghost of My Old Dog''). Even when he's singing about the weekend — on, uh, ''It''s the Weekend'' — Lytle's fragile voice sounds a hairbreadth from tears. C'mon, dude! What could possibly be depressing about weekends in Montana? B...full text So far in 2009, the late Grandaddy’s influence has been reduced to an ice-cream van-style jingle to open Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe (their ‘AM 180’ soundtracks it), so it’s great having frontman Jason Lytle back to remind us there’s more to his songwriting than tee-ing up half an hour of sarcastic moanings about Sky News. While 2000’s ‘The Sophtware Slump’ will remain Lytle’s Mona Lisa, there are enough warm Grandaddyisms here to break a smile through the follicles. Specifically, his spectral vocals comfort like new bedsheets, lyrics straddle tranquillity and loss (‘Ghost Of My Old Dog’) and there are enough sun-over-hill-moments (‘Brand New Sun’) that hold their own against his Snowdon-high standards....full text After dissolving his warmly existential outfit Grandaddy, singer-guitarist-keyboardist Jason Lytle escaped to the mountains of Montana. But instead of the nakedly emotional folk echoes of fellow isolationist Bon Iver, he's produced a textured homage to the lush and laid-back West Coast dream life of his youth. Yours Truly occasionally provides pummeling feedback rock ("It's the Weekend"), but when Lytle's lullaby vocals suggest, "You should hold my hand / While everything blows away / And we'll run to a brand-new sun," it's like Bruce Springsteen's open highway finally reached a melancholy kid from Modesto....full text