The Sophtware Slump

by

Grandaddy

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In many respects, the band Grandaddy is endearingly anachronistic. Consisting of 5 men in their 20's and early 30's, they are very unassuming fellows who dress plainly and wear varying (and at times, disturbingly large) amounts of facial hair. They like to do things like skateboard, shoot guns and drink beer. Their music is something like you might find if there was a place where the sounds of the Beach Boys, Kraftwerk and Neil Young all intersected. On top of it all, their new record, "The Sophtware Slump" is a concept album, one of the mainstays of your typically bad prog-rock outfits, and again harkens to days long since passed. And so you if you haven't heard Grandaddy before, you might read this and wonder wherein then lies the appeal? But this truth of the matter is that this an almost impossibly wonderful, oddly beautiful record. How this is remains something of mystery, yet they pull it off flawlessy. Charisma? Anti-charisma, perhaps? I can't explain.

TSS opens with the ambitious "He's Simple, He's Dumb, He's The Pilot". Against the backdrop of the new millenium, singer Jason Lytle takes stock of the human race: "Adrift again 2000 Man/ You lost your maps / You lost your plans". The song shifts gear several times, veering from uncertainty to cheerful optimism, but ultimately ending in defeat and despair over the plea "Don't give in 2000 man." As the album continues, we find that it's primary theme is technology, and of how it is in danger of spinning out of control, beyond man's abilities to rein it back in. Of how it is shaping (or perhaps more accurately, deforming) the human experience. Consider the epic "Miner At The Dial-A-View", in which a lonely soul visits a facility where he can use a satellite to view distant lovers, friends and family. The concept seems appealing at first, but he ultimately discovers that the experience is poignantly, heartbreakingly empty. He can find his lost love's car, but he can't see her. And with the passage of time, he can no longer recognize the people he is trying to find. The Dial-a-View can let him see, but it cannot let him touch. So he ends up feeling lonelier than ever. His experience mirrors our increasingly online-oriented yet ultimately disconnected existence.

Another theme that is explored is how outdated technology is cast off, and how the resulting detritus is beginning to clog our planet ("Broken Household Appliance National Forest"). And not only that, but what of these disused machines? Do they have souls? When we stop using them, do they end up feeling lonely and rejected? Are they like us? This is wonderfully explored in a pair of songs, "Jed The Humanoid" and "Jed's Other Poem". In the former, the story of Jed is told, a robot built of odds and ends, who is at first celebrated by his creators, and then eventually forgotten. In his despair, Jed ends up trying to emulate his makers, by drinking to try to forget his pain, and is found "all shocked and broken, shut down, exploded." Later, one of the poems Jed had written is discovered and presented by one of his human survivors in song, "Jed's Other Poem", which chillingly begins: "You said I'd wake up dead drunk, alone in the park/ I called you a liar/ but how right you were".

The end result of all this is that the people living among it want to flee. In "The Crystal Lake", the narrator laments having left a bucolic and ostensibly technology-free paradise, and having done so, declares over and over again that "we gotta get out of here" and return to that simpler place. This return-to-nature sentiment is again echoed in the stunningly beautiful "Underneath the Weeping Willow", and the theme of escape is reprised in the closing "So You'll Aim Toward the Sky".

Now of course this is some pretty heady and heavy subject matter. In the hands of a lesser songwriter, it would likely have been an utter disaster. After all, who doesn't remember another rock-and-roll robot by the name of "Mr. Roboto?". But as rendered by Jason Lytle and Grandaddy, this record is a masterpiece. These songs get stuck in your mind like a well-chewed piece of Bazooka Joe can get caught in your hair. The more uptempo numbers, such as "The Crystal Lake" and "Hewlett's Daughter" are driven by chugging guitars, billowing orchestrations, bleeping synth lines, and fragile, REM-state vocals. On slower songs, such as "Weeping Willow", and "Jed's Other Poem" he demonstrates that he is capable of understated but profound beauty. And of course Lytle is wonderfully supported by the rest of his obviously sympathetic bandmates.

In a review of Grandaddy's first LP, I compared them to another of my favorite artists, Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse, but said that their songs didn't pack quite the same punch emotionally as those of Linkous. That no longer holds true. "The Sophtware Slump" is a beautiful and heartfelt record, and the band seems to have fully come into their own. Viva Grandaddy!