Grandaddy – Excerpts from the Diary of Todd Zilla (2005)

For some reason I haven't listened to this mini album that much since I bought it. I didn't think twice to buy anything that Grandaddy released, so I bought it as soon as I found it, but for some reason it didn't spark that much interest on the first listen. And fair enough, it's not as good as the full albums by Grandaddy. It is still Grandaddy, so it's pretty damn good. Excerpts from the Diary of Todd Zilla is not so much a farewell to Lytle's former hometown Modesto, California, as it is a fuck off to that town. Lytle moved away around the time of recording this album and he really didn't care too much for his old home town. Apparently the title of the album comes from something Lytle saw in a vanity license plate in a truck in Modesto. Lytle always struggled with American consumer culture and I'm sure California offers plenty of annoyances for someone like that.



This mini album was recorded while waiting for Grandaddy's last album before their hiatus, Just Like the Fambly Cat. You can sort of hear that period in this album, even though the songs on here are more experimental and more stripped down in terms of production. I feel like this kind of mini album was a chance for Lytle to put out there songs that didn't really fit in anywhere else. He has said that many of these songs were years old around the time of the recording, but he just never had found proper places for them. That makes this mini album perhaps a bit all over the place, but there are still excellent individual songs on it.

The album begins with a very typical Grandaddy song Pull the Curtains. It starts with beautiful and quiet vocals, but pretty soon it explodes with overdriven electric guitars and space-age synthesiser sounds. This is probably a bit more raw for it sounds than most of Grandaddy's music. At My Post starts with strange, sort of off-key synth and guitar bits. There's quite a heavy waltz beat running throughout the song. It's a good example of how good Lytle is in combining hard and heavy instruments with beautiful and delicate melodies and vocals. There are many different parts to this song that barely sound like the same song. A Valley Song (Sparing) is a quiet song, mostly played on acoustic guitar and high-flying smooth synths. In a way, this song sounds a lot more like Lytle's solo career. Cinderland starts with buzzing and heavy synths, but there are also some delicately beautiful piano sequences and outrightly strange noise bits in the song. This song is kind of like a psychedelic dream. Fuck the Valley Fudge is one of those nicely contrasted songs that have angry lyrics, but a very mellow and beautiful melody and intensity. The whole song sounds kind of like it's been recorded in an empty room when it's raining strongly outside. Florida has some quite untypical sounds for Grandaddy. The instrumentations are the same, but it has this fast-tempo rhythm that's more familiar in new-indie bands of the 10s, such as The Drums. The song evolves into a full-on punk rock song with amazingly noisy electric guitars. The album ends with a lullaby-like song Goodbye? which was probably meant to be some kind of Goodbye? for Grandaddy thinking that it might've been written after most of the songs on Fambly Cat. I like the lo-fi aesthetics of this song.

I'm not quite sure if this is an actual music video or made by a fan, but I thought it was pretty good. It's for the song Pull the Curtains. It starts with a teenager waking up in his flat angry. He's going to take revenge on a bunch of other kids. He meets other kids in the streets who he seems to despise because they're making fun of everything. Just when he's about to do something drastic, it seems like the joker from earlier on has been hurt and he starts regretting what he was about to do and goes to help them, but then it turns out, this was just another gag as well and actually the joker was okay. That's when the main character pulls out a guitar from his backpack and does an amazing solo. I don't really know what this means, but it's fun to watch anyway.

Mini albums are not usually that great. I feel like they're just possibilities for artists to release something a bit more experimental that didn't fit anywhere else. Then again, they're great just for that reason. you can find interesting, quite out there, songs that you couldn't find on other types of releases.

Listen to the album on Youtube.