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.
