Atlanta Tabernacle

As 'Chartsengrafs' winds down with its Cars-style guitar-outro, Jason Lytle
introduces Grandaddy as a band that's "been together for a long time
now". To prove it they play 'Taster' from 1995's 'Pretty Mess by This One
Band' EP and 'Laughing Stock' from 97's excellent 'Under the Western
Freeway'. 'Miner at the Dial-A-View' follows. Three long years since 'OK
Computer', its man vs. technology theme should be depressingly anachronistic,
but it thankfully owes more to 'After The Goldrush'-era Neil Young than Thom
Yorke's 'Paranoid Android', and has Brian Wilson-style sighs to boot.


'Non Phenomenal Lineage' segues into 'So You'll Aim Towards The Sky' and
Grandaddy's short set is over. The fact that Grandaddy don't even need to
play sure-fire crowd pleasers like 'Hewlett's Daughter' and 'Summer Here
Kids' is testament to their growing greatness. Tonight they open for some
sadly disinterested Elliott Smith devotees - with any justice by this time
next year they'll be headliners themselves.


Elliott Smith opens his set with 'Needle in the Hay' and one thing quickly
becomes clear: he is preaching to the converted. He rarely interacts with
the doe-eyed crowd, stopping only once to ask how they're doing and if they
liked Grandaddy (fact: most of them didn't even bother showing up that
early). Note-perfect renditions of 'Son of Sam' and 'Can't Make a Sound'
follow, accompanied by a series of lo-fi videos each with a different "Too
Something" theme, "Too Sad", "Too Cold", etc.


Occasionally, as with 'Ballad of Big Nothing', the sheer tunesmith quality
you know he's capable of manages to transcend the lack of showmanship, but
more often than not you can't help feeling that you're being taken on a
cruise-controlled ride. Those who haven't been initiated into the Sad
Poet's fanclub can't help feel that, like the video backdrop, they're stuck
watching someone else's home videos. The devoted may whoop and holler as
each and every hook falls competently but unspectacularly into place, but
the unintentional highlight of the show is when an overexcited girl near
the stage faints and must be carried out - during the "Too Hot" video segment.


During the encore, Smith gets through the first two lines of Big Star's
'Thirteen' before he's overcome by a bout of giggles and gives up. He
threatens to really make things interesting with a cover of the same band's torrid
'Nighttime' but when he similarly aborts after only one line to sing his
own 'Angeles' instead you really can't blame him. As Grandaddy proved,
tonight's crowd isn't really interested in hearing any songs they don't
already know all the words to, and Elliott knows it.

Christopher Huttman