Of course, it's not their fault expectations ran so high. Lord knows their heads-down, caps-over-eyes demeanor never courted conviction. But there is something fundamentally promising about Grandaddy's sound and vision, something that suggests the simultaneous future and past inherent in all Great Rock Moments. Traces of Neil Young, Flaming Lips, Spacemen 3, Radiohead...plus a sad, proud heart all their own. You just get the feeling that they're on to something big.
Opening track "He's Simple, He's Dumb, He's the Pilot" sounds like they may have found it. It's Grandaddy's take on Major Tom's (and Thom's) millennial drift, and it's a wonderful, ambitious 9-minute opus. It's odd that they decided to open the album with such a custom-built finale.
Even more curious is the sudden directionlessness that proceeds to grip the album. Almost every song here seems unfinished, and while the The Sophtware Slump sounds great -- misfiring machines duel elegant pianos, guitars chug and grind, ancient synthesizers burst through the top end - it never goes much of anywhere.
"Crystal Lake" recalls Grandaddy's first single and finest moment, "Summer Here Kids," and briefly lends the album some momentum despite a half-hearted chorus. That momentum dissipates, though, by the time they've muddled through the baffling "Broken Household Appliance National Forest," featuring an arrangement so poor it could only have been intentional.
And that's what's really frustrating -- Grandaddy have chosen to bury pretty sounds and captivating ideas ("Miner At the Dial-A-View" is an exquisite musical novella) amidst the awkward and the underdeveloped. Clearly they wanted this album to subvert expectations, but The Sophtware Slump is less an idiosyncratic classic than a willful underachievement.
If you like Grandaddy, check out:
Grandaddy Under The Western Freeway
The Flaming Lips Zaireeka
Radiohead OK Computer
-- jf
