When Revolver came out, or Dark Side Of The Moon, or Never Mind The Bollocks, or Appetite for Destruction, or Nevermind or (add yer own here _____(mine would be XO by Elliott Smith)), did the public immediately sit up and shout “Classic Album!!” with much gusto and emphasis on the 2 exclamation marks, or did they let the music fester inside their collective brains for a few months before decrying it worthy of such lofty status?
The mists of time have blurred perception of such trivial matters, and I suppose we’ll never know how it felt for the record buying public as a whole to hear these albums for the first time, but for what it’s worth I think most of these albums were growers first and classics later; albums full of songs, sounds and symphonies that lodged themselves into the brain after many needle drops and repeated listens and gradually became so important to the listener that over time they knew and loved every little detail about them. But what stands the above records apart from the XOs of the world is that those tiny little details were so important to thousands, even millions of people.
Alongside Elliott Smith’s finest hour stands The Sophtware Slump by Grandaddy. I’ve loved it and played it to death since it was released in 2000. Maybe not every day, or every week or even once a month, but at least a couple of times a year I’ll reach for it (I don’t need to dig it out, I know exactly where it is) and listen to it. And I mean listen to it. Not as background music while the TV flickers silently in the corner with subtitles on. Not as background music while I fry something to death on the gas hob. No. I sit there in my favourite chair and listen to it from start to finish. Uninterrupted. Which is hard in a house with 2 young children and a wife with a ‘to do’ list longer than a giraffe’s neck, but I manage it somehow.
As a band, Grandaddy mostly passed me by, but I was working in a record shop (remember them?) when The Sophtware Slump came out and I played it to death one afternoon, bought it that night, went home and played it to death again, went to work the next day, played it to death again….you get the idea. Sandwiched somewhere between ZZ Top and those Fleet Foxes, most of Grandaddy had the finest beards in music. And like those two hirsute bands above, they had the tunes to match. Taking elements of 70s Pink Floyd (none of yer trendy Syd-era Floyd here), the album is mainly a (whisper it) concept album about science v’s nature/man v’s robots – a full 2 years before fellow cosmic travellers the Flaming Lips had thought up the ‘original’ concept about Yoshimi and his pink robots. Opening track He’s Simple, He’s Dumb, He’s the Pilot begins with some chirpping birds and creaking front porch banjo before blooming into this magical 8 minute opus on 21st Century living. Coincidentally, when the band supported Elliott Smith, Elliott was fond of joining Grandaddy on stage to sing along (crappy old mp3 of it here) The album meanders melancholically through ruminations on androids who drink themselves to death and the problems of and with technology before arriving at this – Miner at The Dial-A-View, a weird and wonderfully melodic tale about ‘dreaming of going home’ – back to pre-CCTV times.
Tracks ebb and flow from one to another, an acoustic guitar here, a spacey keyboard there, all sewn together by a high pitched reedy voice much like Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips or Mercury Rev’s Jonathan Donahue. If Neil Young had lost the Les Paul and kicked out the (Pearl) Jams (Motherfucker!) he might’ve been making records as essential as this.
For my money, The Sophtware Slump is as essential as OK Computer. It really is. You’ve heard a coupla tracks. Now do the decent thing and go and buy it. Whatchawaitin’ for?
