By Jonah Cashel, Copy Editor

[Dangerbird Records; 2023]

Rating: 7/10

Key Tracks: “My Little Skateboarding Problem”, “The Town where I’m Livin Now”, “Running Cable at Shiva’s”

Cult Indie band Grandaddy celebrated the 20 year anniversary of their breakout record, Sumday, this month with the release of Sumday: Excess Baggage, a collection of unreleased tracks from their iconic early-2000s era. The record is a piece of Sumday Twunny, a four-LP box set that features a remaster of the original 2003 album and a collection of original cassette demos of the songs therein. Though technically a collection of b-sides and extras from the album, Excess Baggage feels like its own project that never made its way to release. Rough-around-the-edges like a record that has been collecting dust for years, the songs take on new life coming from an older, matured Grandaddy.

The record begins with “My Little Skateboarding Problem”, a stunning symphony that immerses the listener in a spacey dreamscape before setting them back down into the bleaker depths of the rest of the album. While most of the songs lean more towards the folk side, this track opens with a purely electronic sound that is truly transportative. This kind of abstract instrumental is uncommon in Grandaddy’s lyric-intensive discography, solidifying the album as something special—a long lost artifact of the band’s history.

Read more: Album Review: Don Toliver – Lovesick

What comes after, though, stays true to that small-town, lo-fi feel the band is known for. The lyrics evoke mundane yet touching scenes set in run down parking lots, bars, and living rooms while the melodies make it somehow feel all warm and fuzzy. 

“I like making songs like this. Lots of bleak but sweet visuals. Everyday stuff available for everyone to see…but some of us just end up with the twisted work of documenting it,” said frontman Jason Lytle in a recent press release.

That work evidently pays off in the star track “The Town where I’m Livin Now,” a melancholy ode to places forgotten by the world that still contain beauty in their own way. Lines like, “The grown-ups ride BMX bikes / Every now and then, stopping to cry on a lawn” get at something strange and beautiful about this record; even though these songs were written twenty years ago, they seemingly capture the growth of the group into maturity and adulthood.

Excess Baggage is both a celebration and a reflection on all the ups and downs the band has been through since their start in 1996. With a break-up in 2006 after Just Like The Fambly Cat and the death of founding member Kevin Garcia after their 2017 comeback, Last Place, there truly is a lot of baggage in their history that this record encapsulates. While it certainly doesn’t surpass the richness that Sumday still holds, it is a worthy addition to the album’s legacy and Grandaddy’s discography as a whole.

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