live @ 930 Club 10.26.2000
California band Grandaddy once recorded a song called “Everything Beautiful Is Far Away” and indeed, vocalist and songwriter Jason Lytle’s evocation of a dreamy and distant space world where technology and nature mingle in oddly emotional ways made their breakthrough album of this year, “The Sophtware Slump”, so exhilarating. Grandaddy even got the stamp of official Space Oddity approval when David Bowie turned up to check out a recent New York gig.
The quintet touched down at the 930 Club Thursday night to share a bill with Elliot Smith and they tempered their rippling space tunes with a bracing rustic informality. Lytle, bearded and ball-capped, hunched behind a rack of out-dated-looking keyboards that were decorated with leaves, twigs and a plastic bird or two. That decor (as well as the bird perched on bassist Kevin Garcia’s hat) made perfect sense, since the best songs Grandaddy played---”The Crystal Lake”, “Miner at the Dial-A-View” and “Hewlett’s Daughter”--- drew equally from Neil Young’s back-to-the-California-countryside rockisms and Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” keyboard orbits. Grandaddy manages to fly so high because they make that potentially sour pairing into a transporting whole.
Another element growing on Grandaddy’s dream farm is the lo-fi melodic rock of Pavement, which turned up in “Chartsengrafs”, but that style isn’t as galvanizing as the band’s cushioning of Lytle's softer melodies and high, quavering voice in cascading sheets of dream rock. When they did, Grandaddy’s 45-minute set proved they were capable of sustaining a higher orbit than any that other spaced-out rockers--Major Thom Yorke included---are currently in.
Washington Post, September 2000
