Tim Heidecker - In Glendale

Pitchfork 65

Tim Heidecker has built a thriving career in comedy, delighting a wide swath of teens, stoners, and other assorted weirdos with sketches that lean heavily on surreal absurdity. The comedian has dabbled in music already with his Tim & Eric co-conspirators Eric Wareheim and Davin Wood, but the new In Glendale is only his second under his own name (the other is 2011’s Cainthology: Songs in the Key of Cain, ten songs about former presidential candidate Herman Cain).

The ten-track LP arrives via Rado Records, a new Jagjaguwar imprint from Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado. In Glendale doesn’t quite have such a concrete unifying concept, but it does focus on “normcore” in all its glory—or, more accurately, its lack thereof. Heidecker declares his love for the suburb over anywhere else in America on the opening title track, and without knowing his résumé, it would be easy to mistake “In Glendale” for a painfully earnest tune written by a dad who still desperately wants to be cool. Late in the record, “I Saw Nicolas Cage” feels like a familiar version of the kind of thrilling celebrity non-encounter that one of your relatives recounts at every family gathering.

“Work From Home,” though, is a magnificent tribute to the days when you’re too sick (let’s be real: hungover) to function at work, so you promise to “work from home,” but you’re equally useless there. In Glendale isn’t a riff on the sort of rock that glorifies the difficult common-man endeavors of the American working class. Rather, it’s about the extremely boring real-life shit that most of us deal with every day—to which Heidecker offers a literal nod with “Cleaning Up The Dog Shit.”

But while all the songs are fun, there’s an occasional dark streak that elicits nervous laughter as much as anything else. Heidecker begins “Ghost in My Bed” with “I put your head in a plastic bag and I buried it under the Hollywood sign,” before detailing the thoughts of a killer who was probably just a regular guy having a good time before the whole murder situation happened. Likewise, “I Dare You To Watch Me Sleep” reads like a creepy letter from a stranger. They’re so at odds with their otherwise unassuming instrumentation, and fit in so neatly among their counterparts, that you can miss them on a casual first pass.

All jokes aside, In Glendale actually is a pretty slick rock record. From any other outfit, it would be a solid effort, with horns and keys providing muscle to every song. Even the piano-led coda of “Ocean’s Too Cold” sounds like it could’ve been lifted from any other polished indie rock record. Heidecker manages to sneak humor into the liner notes, too: every player is noted parenthetically as “other featured artist,” while Heidecker is noted as a “contracted featured artist.” Like the rest of his comedy oeuvre, Heidecker pulls no punches. In Glendale arrives as a fully formed beast, equal parts parody and confession of our universal lameness. Heidecker is definitely laughing at himself and most of us, too—whether you drop your self-importance is up to you.