A Young Twist on an Old Topic

“He’s Simple, He’s Dumb, He’s the Pilot” isn’t just the title of the opening song of this Modesto rock quintet’s second album. It’s also pretty much a summary of singer-songwriter Jason Lytle’s take on the plight of his fellow man.

Though the album title and several of Lytle’s lyrics suggest an anti-technology assault, the real target here is human vanity and limitations--all set against a fuzzy, almost dreamlike musical framework that suggests an acoustic coming together of Neil Young and Major Tom, the lonely astronaut from David Bowie’s old “Space Oddity” single.

Lytle’s special interest in technology is how its speed and power can magnify human misadventures, making the latest inventions obsolete at a faster pace than ever. The photos in the album booklet show discarded computer keyboards littering the landscape, and Lytle speaks in “Broken Household Appliance National Forest” about a time when “meadows resemble showroom floors/And owls fly out of oven doors.”

But this lo-fi collection’s most disarming moment offers a sort of “Toy Story” bittersweetness. “Jed the Humanoid” is a fantasy about building a robot so perfect that it can run, walk and even speak in complete thoughts. After a while though, Jed’s human pals turn their attention to new interests. By this time, however, the robot has adopted so many human characteristics that it self-destructs on alcohol--not, however, before he leaves behind a poem that Lytle says he’d like to sing “funny, like Beck,” but “it’s bringing me down.”

Besides Young and Bowie, you’ll find traces of Radioheadman Thom Yorke’s sensitivity and even some of Gram Parsons’ wary yearning in these tracks. But mostly “The Sophtware Slump” radiates with the observation and ambition of a striking new voice.

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Albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor), two stars (fair), three stars (good) and four stars (excellent). The albums are already released unless otherwise noted.