Grandaddy

“Don’t give in, 2000 man,” sighs Jason Lytle through the nine-minute prog-epic heartbreaker that is ‘He’s Simple, He’s Dumb, He’s The Pilot,’ and a theatre-ful of enthusiastic Lytle-people are delighted to have him looking out for us. Funny to have two bands frowning at the plight of frail humans in the face of the banal-new-world technological age at the moment; but where Radiohead might look upon the replacement of the human soul with an ISDN line with hallucinatory levels of despair, Grandaddy are far less ill at ease with the strange, essentially Frankenstein-ish grafting of technology onto real life.

Like the keyboards turning, albeit slowly, back into dust on the sleeve of last year’s masterpiece The Sophtware Slump, Grandaddy know nature will always win out over technology, that rust never sleeps, and so for them it’s a strange but comfortable marriage: mud and metal (as they themselves would say) mixin’ good. So the unspoiled glory of ‘The Crystal Lake’ (laughing at modern man and ‘shining like a chandelier’) is represented by burbling keyboard arpeggios, zipping garishly up and down like the jackpot lights on a Vegas slot machine; and the tumble-dryer-studded rough terrain of ‘Broken Household Appliance National Forest’ is celebrated with a kerranging rock-shop full of guitars that go for it open-throttle like the fiery Daytona 500 race-car casualties on the projection screen overhead, spinning out of control like flaming metal planets catapulted out of orbit.

If you don’t count the cheerfully woozy singalong cover of ‘You Are My Sunshine’ with which they open the set, ‘Jed The Humanoid’ is probably our favourite tonight: full of wide open spaces, massive, majestically blatting Neil Youngish cathedral-organs and a tiny, faraway voice, mourning Jed as he drinks himself tragicomically into obsolescence like a sensitive, poetry-writing Bender from Futurama. With bands like Grandaddy around, 2000 Man might be OK after all.