at a glance...

Hometown: San Francisco, CA
Formed: late 80s

Personnel:
Felix Costanza -guitar and vocals
Ajax Green -guitar, vocals, accordion
J. Palmer -drums, percussion, vocals, saw
Jeff Stevenson -bass, vocals, pedal steel
Other Personnel:
Danny Heifetz -chinese trumpet, vibraphone, glockenspiel, timpani
Carrie Bradley -violin
Ralph Carney -baritone saxophone
Sonya Hunter -vocals
Michael Holt -piano and organ
William Winant -gongs, bells, marimba, timpani, snare drum

Bands In The Family:
Sister Double Happiness, The Mommyheads, Sunny Day Real Estate , Tarnation.

Notes:
Many moons ago, Todd Costanza (aka Felix Todd Costanza) started the engine of the band known as Granfaloon Bus. After motoring around in San Diego for a few years in late 80's, the Bus cruised on up the Coast to San Francisco, where over the past seven years the three other founding members disembarked one by one. As seats on the Bus opened up, Ajax Green hopped on as guitarist and backing vocalist circa 1993, Jeff Palmer (aka "Palmer") has had his butt firmly planted in the drummer's seat since 1994, and Jeff Stevenson lugged his bass rig aboard a mere two years ago. With Todd at the lyrical and vocal wheel, they spent the month of March 1999 careening through Europe, spreading the GBus gospel in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. They're currently revving their engines for the release of their new rarities and B-Sides album Necks and Backs.

Before you slip Granfaloon Bus's latest release, Good Funeral Weather, into your CD player, take a few moments to prepare yourself for a trip through Todd Costanza's disturbingly entrancing dreamscape. From the first notes of the album, you are greeted with the news that the "hometown's declared a ghost town", and regaled with a mournful tale of the grandparents who "died broke and alone...before plastic could improve their lives". That's a year's worth of fodder for your therapist packed into the first 6 minutes of this heartbreakingly beautiful album. And there's plenty more were that came from.

Throughout this melancholy guided journey, you can witness the narrators' desperate search for a happy tomorrow, which is invariably sabotaged by the endless land mines littering the emotional landscape. The most upbeat number on the album, "We're Sellin' Helen's Hearse", might get your toes a-tappin', or even your booty shakin'. If this is indeed that case, be forewarned that you may feel a little sheepish when you hit the line "Now that Helen's dead, we can box up her portraits and screw on her king size bed." Now that's what I call a party!

The words are honest and true, gritty and raw, and set to music that owes no debt to time or genre, and though I hesitate to invoke the term "folk" to describe it, that will just have to do. The songs loll about at their own pace, and Costanza's voice is a remarkable instrument, a fragile and vulnerable tenor which exploits the tense pitches between notes, and phrasing which is quirky and challenging.

Costanza's bandmates, multi-instrumentalists all, freely float around all kinds of equipment such as a mournful saw or weeping slide guitar, to expand and deepen the colors of the emotional palette. They manage to weave their distinctive sonic web in and around the words, complementing yet never obscuring them. Arrangements on the album range from the nearly a-capella to the orchestral, and in the stunner "I'm a Leaf", sometimes both within the same song.

This album works on a number of levels, depending on your mood and how closely you want to listen. While you could appreciate some of its aesthetic merits while you do the dishes or chat with friends, I encourage you to capitalize on a more pensive moment to appreciate its complexity, and to meditate on the arresting poetic images that lurk in the dark corners, waiting sucker punch you. It feels good, I promise.