In a coup d'etat of poor planning last winter, Grandaddy decided to call it a day before the best work of its career even got to the shelves. A buoyant sprite of an EP, Excerpts From the Diary of Todd Zilla's well-crafted space-pop redeemed the hope lost when things were played wearily safe on 2003's blah Sumday. It showed how bratty punk energy ("Pull the Curtains"), absent since the band's infancy, could mesh with the beautiful arrangement skills it learned in the time since ("Florida"). But Zilla also came with the unfortunate announcement: Sorry, kids, it's splitsville. The postmortem Just Like the Fambly Cat (V2), while occasionally uneven, has high points that surpass Grandaddy's work on the critical favorite The Sophtware Slump (see the sunburst synth coda in "The Animal World"), but the impending doom theme leaves us wondering if this was the plan all along. Can't you picture Jason Lytle holed up with his bandmates in Modesto, recording and knowing they would never perform these songs as a band? Could it be they crafted music around the thought that the bells and whistles would have to be stripped down to Lytle on acoustic guitar and his buddy Rusty Miller of Jackpot on accompaniment? Maybe we can ask him this stuff ourselves. Touring solo in support of Fambly, Lytle's stop at World Café Live next week is billed as "An evening with," which usually means a bit of audience Q&A to sate our collective curiosity.