Who will finally put the lie to the Manifest Destiny? Notwithstanding our current New York-centric hipster circle-jerk, westward expansion was a defining myth of the hippie-dippie Baby Boomin' rock'n'roll gypsy show that ultimately spawned so much of what we now call Now That's What I Call Indie Pop, Vol. XIV. Yet no California frontier has more cruelly blindsided its pilgrims, from Okies to Mexicans to dangerously lost cork dorks, than Grandaddy's Central Valley. Latest offering Excerpts From the Diary of Todd Zilla suggests it's time for Grandaddy to leave Modesto to the exurbanites ('sOK, I grew up near Sacramento) and explore some new terrain.
Recorded in eight-track at one of freshly beardless vocalist Jason Lytle's home studios, the new EP revisits the ruffled power-pop of 1997's Under the Western Freeway more than the computer-shocked Lipsedelia of 2000 paranoid-Kid-droid touchstone The Sophtware Slump or 2003's glossy Sumday. Indeed, Todd Zilla is a goofy, sloppy mini-album, cramming familiar Weezer fuzz, stoned piano ballads, playful analogue synths, and misguided Bad Company references into a little more than half an hour. Reportedly, none of the songs will recur on Grandaddy's fifth full-length, expected in aught-six. That makes Todd Z. tempting like a dollar menu, so too bad only perfunctory crunch-and-"ahh" opener "Pull the Curtains" really rises above B-side caliber.
Lytle sounds bored beneath his typical raised-glazed vox, and it shows. Much of the record is devoted to lambasting his current locale with cruise-control accompaniment: Piano ballad "Fuck the Valley Fudge" sticks it to the strip malls nursery-rhyme style, "A Valley Son (Sparing)" lets plaintive acoustic guitars and Venutian sworls do the whining, and another piano ballad, "Cinderland", spreads like a ravine for a shrugging/shrugworthy chorus. The songs are better when they're more ambivalent, like "At My Post", which laments failed attempts to leave town while flipping from sludgy space waltz to shuffling ob-la-di blah. Whistlin' campfire closer "Goodbye?" focuses on this indecision straight-on, but you gotta hope the answer will be more interesting than the question.
Sure, the West is weird, but not much weirder than the rest of the country these days. "There's more ATMs with air-conditioning/ Than there are birds on the wing," Lytle helpfully offers, providing a clunky everything-un-Zen Exhibit A for a venue change. I'm all for keeping it local, but even Fresno native Aaron Espinoza of Earlimart eventually found his way as far as Silverlake. Just please don't dally in "Florida"; the EP's abortive emocore in-joke is barely OK to visit once, but you'd never want to live there. And yet: Go somewhere, brother, whether geographically, musically, or both.
