REVIEW: Grandaddy, The Sophtware Slump (V2)
- Chris Hill
With '97's Under the Western Freeway their only full album, the long wait for Grandaddy's wryly titled second cd has been somewhat eased by a European-only disc compiling their first two EP's (_The Broken Down Comforter Collection) and last year's four track Signal to Snow Ratio EP. Now the wait is over, and The Sophtware Slump has arrived. Not unexpectedly, the record is of amazing caliber and unreservedly my favorite cd to date in 2000.
"He's Simple, He's Dumb, He's the Pilot" opens the album with samples of birdsong and passing cars stopped mid-Doppler effect. The contrasting sources are a sonic mirror to the cd's thematic tentpole of a technological society increasingly estranged from both nature and their own humanity. "He's..." is an allegory of mankind lost in the new millennium, searching for stability and direction ("Adrift again 2000 man/You lost your maps/You lost the plans"). Synthesizers serve as a Greek chorus, aping a data stream one moment and a bass choir the next.
This electronic versatility is exploited throughout the album to wonderful effect. Jason Lytle, songwriter and producer of the band, is a master with dials and knobs. His synthesized sound creations also emulate angelic tones, flickering fire, or the last electronic gasps of poor Jed the Humanoid - whatever the need, there's a subtle brushstroke to underline the moment. While most of the disc's tunes drop their hooks with synthesized bait, the other four Grandaddy members (drummer Aaron Burtch, keyboardist Tim Dryden, guitarist Jim Fairchild, and bassist Kevin Garcia) add luring touches of their own throughout the cd, and yet more textures to the disc's multiple layers.
"I dream at night/of going home someday/Somewhere so far away/So dream, alright/I know it's gonna take some time/I'm going home someday." "Miner at the Dial-A-View" takes a satellite view at surroundings close to the singer's heart, yet unreachable and removed. "Fifteen years is almost done/I don't recognize anyone/ >From the Dial-A-View" - the song is similar to a previous single, "Everything Beautiful is Far Away", with its subjects both far away from home. The song gains my firm vote for second single, with the melancholic "Hewlett's Daughter" requested for the third position.
No doubt fed by the rural isolation of Modesto, the band's California hometown, the first single, "The Crystal Lake", is another song of disunity: in this case, pristine nature, where a lost Eden is missed and the singer vows to return. "It's shining like a chandelier/shining somewhere/far away from here/ ...I've gotta get out of here/and find my way again." Despite this distance between the man and his lost horizon, there's a simple hope that paradise can and will be regained, whether by fleeing urban chaos here, by a Rip van Winkle sleep on the quiet piano track "Underneath the Weeping Willow", or by a launch into the heavens on the stellar, early Alan Parsons Project-esque "So You'll Aim Towards the Sky".
Technology, while it alienates, can endear as well. A wondrous, poem-spouting computer receives a touching elegy on "Jed the Humanoid": "Last night something pretty bad happened/We lost a friend/...Jed's system's dead/Therefore so is Jed". Yet Jed's poetry lives on, and "Jed's Other Poem (Beautiful Ground)" joins "Jeddy 3's Poem" from the Signal to Snow Ratio EP as a (un)living legacy. One sly mystery revealed: in the last seconds of "Jed the Humanoid", a quick vocal (actually spoken in reverse) quotes from the Electric Light Orchestra's "Fire On High" off Face the Music: "The music is reversible, but time can't turn back".
Maybe not, but albums like this capture time and mood and hold them fast. That's a precious quality to be cherished.
Grandaddy's website: http://www.grandaddylandscape.com Their label home: http://www.v2music.com, or directly found at http://www.grandaddy.v2music.com.
