The aroma of joss sticks wafts out from the stage over the largely – um – relaxed audience. The set is adorned with stuffed crows sitting atop TV aerials. The weird pile of wheezing keyboards and effects gadgets which form Jason Lytle’s console sports a blackbird and a cat. The surreal backdrop cranks into action and Modesto’s finest take the stage in all their accustomed sartorial inelegance. “We love your drummer”, shouts a lady and Aaron Burtch smiles with a mixture of shyness and pleasure. He may not be a sex symbol but he is the undisputed chain-smoking champion of the world. This tour has been going well and an air of confidence and general joy at how much they are loved pervades the band. Tim Dryden and Kevin Garcia give absolutely nothing away, but both Jason and guitarist Jim Fairchild are visibly emotional, the latter doubtless because this year he has survived being run over by a truck.
“So many songs, so little time”, sighs Jason in response to the audience’s shouted requests, and it’s true, any band which can afford to omit “Hewlett’s Daughter” through insufficient time has one hell of a catalogue. Spanning gems from “Under The Western Freeway” and items from “The Software Slump” and “Sumday”, the albums on which their rural-techno-prog identity was truly established, the biggest cheers are reserved for “Standby”, “The Crystal Lake” and my personal heart-stopper “The Group Who Couldn’t Say”. The place erupts as Jason’s duck decoy signals “Now It’s On” (introduced as “one of the best songs written on the day this song was written”), while the supremely atmospheric “He’s Simple, He’s Dumb, He’s The Pilot”, dedicated to the band’s friend and musical antecedent Elliott Smith, makes a winning coda.
“We’re nobodies from nowhere, thank you for welcoming us to somewhere” is Jason’s self-deprecating comment on the evening. Nobodies? I don’t think so.
Grandaddy – Ancienne Belgique, Brussels
