I remember the year 2000. I remember how we called it Y2K, which sounds more like the name of a virus than a year, like something that might make you rethink where you get your meats and produce. I remember a global panic about data that might be lost on computers programmed to interpret years as only two digits instead of four. When we hit 2000, they would just read "00," as if God's finger slipped on the reset button. Ironically (and of course), it was all our fault. But then January 1, 2000 came, and I remember it being like every other day. Some slot machines at a racetrack in Delaware stopped working, and a little after midnight, an alarm at a nuclear power plant in Onagawa, Japan went off in the dark.
I remember how in 1999 Grandaddy were like a lot of other decent underdog indie bands that I had an indefensible soft spot for: mopey and withdrawn, with a few mixtape-worthy songs. Then they released The Sophtware Slump in early 2000, and all of a sudden they sounded like they had a particular perspective, a particular substance. Their gift is that they still managed to sound insubstantial. The sadness that sounded like passivity on 1997's Under the Western Freeway turned into philosophy on The Sophtware Slump: nonchalance as a way of isolating yourself from what bothers you. Not that The Sophtware Slump is in any way major-- being major is the work of artistes, and part of Grandaddy's appeal was that they just seemed like low-key guys from central California tooling around in the basement.
Most of the album sounds like countryish Neil Young songs coated in synthesizer gloss-- a style that borrows a little of Young's earthy tenderness, a little of Pavement's studied indifference, and a little of the switched-on melancholy of an ELO ballad. They sang about national forests filled with broken appliances and robot friends who woke up drunk in parks. The text on the cover of the CD booklet was spelled out in letters from an old PC keyboard over a grassy meadow with mountains in the background. Flip through to the last page, and you'll see a cowboy walking into the sunset with a Casio under his arm.
Basically, The Sophtware Slump is the point where the deflated myth of the American West met the deflated myth of technological salvation. The fear isn't that computers would destroy us, it's that we'd end up living in a futuristic world but still have the same old problems. It's like how David Bowie released "Space Oddity" 10 days before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon: Somehow, he knew people would get lonely up there, because people get lonely no matter where they go. If Radiohead captured a feeling of pre-millenial tension, The Sophtware Slump captured the feeling of disappointment that came afterward-- the feeling that life was going to be more or less the same as it had been, only now we'd have to live with the fact that we once thought it'd be so different: the feeling of January 2, 2000.
At the time, Grandaddy weren't the only band that played sparkly, cinematic indie music: Mercury Rev's Deserter's Songs had come out in 1998, and the Flaming Lips' The Soft Bulletin came out in 1999. The difference is in both scale and character: Unlike the Flaming Lips or Mercury Rev, Grandaddy were a five-person band that sounded like five people playing together in a room, not five people using the studio to make the sound of a hundred. Even when they use synthesizers to replicate orchestral instruments, it has a miniaturistic quality, like the grandeur of early Hollywood trapped inside a snowglobe.
Lyrically, the album is just as contained. Instead of singing about the grand and tearful breakup between man and nature, Jason Lytle sings about wanting to lie down and sleep under a single tree. Fluffy, abstract lyrics like, "I dream at night of going home some day," are grounded by concrete ones: "Tire scraps on federal roads look like crash-landed crows," a metaphor that uses one tactile, breakable thing to describe another.
Does the album sound quaint now? Sure. It sounded quaint then, too. Grandaddy's image-- crunchy guys with trucker hats and beards-- was instantly rustic. Their sound was irrelevant. Blowing minds and challenging conventions takes hard work and ego, and Grandaddy never seemed like they had a real capacity for either. But being as essentially easygoing as they are is also what makes all the thematic material here so approachable, if you buy into it at all: Most of the time, it just doesn't sound like they're trying to prove a point-- a sense of modesty that made them feel more seductive and appealing to me than artists who showed up with grand statement in hand.
It's funny to me that this album is being given the deluxe reissue treatment only 10 years after first being released, but I guess nostalgia is kicking in sooner these days. Deserter's Songs was reissued recently too, along with records by Sebadoh and Archers of Loaf-- records that don't feel like they were gone all that long. The sound is clearer and better delineated here than it was on the initial release, and the bonus material-- which includes demos and a couple of EPs released around the same time-- is interesting to listen to once or twice but never gives me the feeling that they could've made The Sophtware Slump any more focused and consistent than it is.
And sad, too. What a sad, sad album. There's not a happy song on it, really. But there's no angst or despair either, because angst and despair are exhausting emotions. Most of the time, Lytle sounds like the archetypal 90s slacker: observant, slow-moving, dulled by a suburban kind of pain he can't shake. Beck in 1994, without panache or a flair for Art. Beck comes up once, actually, in "Jed's Other Poem (Beautiful Ground)", a lyric supposedly written by their robot friend, Jed: "I try to sing it funny like Beck/ But it's bringin' me down." Cheer up: It didn't get better, but it didn't get much worse, either.
