Grandaddy at L.A.'s Troubadour

I wish to shout my love for Grandaddy from the rooftops. There is no subtlety or cynicism in my embrace, no apologies, no regrets, only a pure and unadulterated adoration. When I was 15 I felt this way about a lot of bands, but something in the passing of years has taken the punch out of my obsessions. This is not necessarily a bad thing. My passions may be slow to kindle now, but the fire burns brighter and longer into the night.

On my first listen to Grandaddy's second album, Sophtware Slump, the dreamy, melodic indie rock was a mild and pleasant surprise, but there were a few touches of predictability that kept the seduction at bay. Yet like all great albums, with each listen Grandaddy began to creep under my skin, seep into my pores, their California countryboy charm slowly but surely making its sticky way to my heart. The boys from Modesto have, over the course of the last year, spread the gospel of Grandaddy far and wide, touring with Elliott Smith and headlining their own passage through Europe and the States. In that time I have seen three shows, and it would seem that that certain live concert "magic," something most bands stumble on only occasionally, is a common occurrence for Grandaddy. I've witnessed their following grow from a scattered crowd at Silverlake's Spaceland to last week's two sold-out shows at the Troubadour. These concerts, I've noticed, are increasingly populated by young men with ragged beards and baseball hats worn low and round in front, as if they've just stepped off the tractor to have a sip of Ma's lemonade in the heat. Grandaddy's farmboy antifashion has become fashionable.

Sophtware Slump is a concept album, complete with a cohesive theme and an operatic narrative, and for the live shows the band has translated the album's message (nature vs. technology) into a series of semi-linear video clips that introduce (via handwritten cardboard signs) each song. The footage varies throughout the set, moving from home movie clips of Modesto's agricultural grit and sprawl to cuts from 60s road movies, 50s fairytale films and a few long, painfully explicit documentary shots of a Northern native tribe skinning and gutting an elk (not for the squeamish or the PETA radical, but disconcertingly beautiful nonetheless).

Over these images floats the voice of Grandaddy's frontman Jason Lytle, who sings in a strangely plaintive falsetto, as if at any moment he might begin wailing or screaming or laughing or weeping, but he never does. Emotion is contained, limited only to a harsh, off-kilter whisper or a smooth, slow exhale of melody. While Grandaddy's music is not the sort that usually survives the transition to the stage (sweeping, layered, atmospheric), and although Lytle does not have the charisma of a Nick Cave or an early Peter Murphy (performers who can transform "mellow" into "theatrical"), he does possess an unmistakable intensity. He crouches low over his keyboard like a dog over supper, stealing occasional looks at the audience from under the brim of his hat. The rest of band follows suit, paying more attention to their instruments than to their fans; but rather than feeling left out, for the audience there is a sense of happy voyeurism, a thankfulness that you are privy to Grandaddy without the distractions of stage antics or pyrotechnics or lead-man posturing.

Despite the video clips and the rare glance from Lytle, at the Troubadour I discovered that the best way to listen to Grandaddy play is with the eyes closed and head hanging loose on your neck. I may have looked like an idiot, but it was worth it. In the dark I began to notice the bass pushing at the walls of my gut, the keyboard drumming its fingers against my ribs. I forgot the sights and concentrated only on the sounds, which, in Grandaddy's case, are invariably sublime. There were even moments, caught in the melodic sweep of "He's Simple, He's Dumb, He's the Pilot," throughout the singsong lament of "Underneath the Weeping Willow," during the ballad of "Jed the Humanoid," when I felt myself begin to rise above the plastic cups and the cigarette butts and float away into Grandaddy's world; where the crickets drone and the tractors roar, where the breeze smells of warm soil and dry grass and in the sky there is always the electric taste of rust, like the air in summer just before a storm.