There must be lots of ways to see the end in sight when you’re in a band. Financial difficulties, a dwindling fan-base, increasingly negative reviews – all of these are frequent occurrences. Watching your lead singer record an album by himself and then release it under the band name, however, must be a bit awkward. So it was with Grandaddy who released this short album as a prelude to their last proper album. Was it a cause, or an effect of their parting, I wonder…‘Excerpts’ is both familiar ground and new territory for Jason Lytle. It’s a definite turn away from the more complicated and polished work of ‘The Sophtware Slump’ and ‘Sumday’, but at the same time, it captures the feel of the band’s earlier work very thoroughly. Pretty much every trick in the Grandaddy repertoire is on display here. Burbling keyboards? ‘Pull The Curtains’. Slightly bizarre lyrical references to the contrasts of nature and technology? ‘At My Post’. Gently fragile acoustic tracks? ‘A Valley Son’. Dense layers of woozy sound? ‘Cinderland’. Wavering vocals over a piano that sounds like it was recorded in another room? The unnecessarily profane ‘F**k The Valley Fudge’. Exuberant noise that careers all over the place? ‘Florida’. Acoustic strum-along that turns into a slow-burning epic closer? ‘Goodbye’. And we’re done.
If you’re a fan of their other work, you’ll enjoy this. Certainly, as it was released, it was enough to give you confidence that future solo work from Lytle would be worth following. Not an album to start with, though.
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