Commit Yourself Completely is billed as a Car Seat Headrest live album, but it’s not all that conceptually different than Will Toledo’s studio releases. By collecting and reconfiguring previously available Car Seat Headrest songs, Commit Yourself Completely joins Teens of Style, a “Greatest Hits”-style sampler of his wildly prolific early years on Bandcamp, and last year’s Twin Fantasy (Face to Face), an upgraded recording of Toledo’s 2011 cult classic. Even Teens of Denial was subject to 2016’s most costly ex post facto tinkering this side of The Life of Pablo, and its outtakes were made available two years prior on How to Leave Town. But if Toledo has mostly used Matador’s reputation and reach to refurbish his catalog for a larger audience, Commit Yourself Completely aims to present Car Seat Headrest not as “Will Toledo,” but a mighty seven-piece filling a 1000-seat theater near you.
Commit Yourself Completely was culled from about 50 shows on their 2018 tour and makes no attempt to imply otherwise—each of its nine tracks mentions the venue in which it was recorded. After finishing off a chiseled “Fill in the Blank,” Toledo asks “How many of you guys are in college?” to a crowd in Columbus, Ohio. The reaction is accordingly raucous for the home of the fourth-largest university in the United States. It’s his segue to a performance of “Drugs With Friends” in Amiens, France, which was likely the smallest gig they played on that tour.
“I...feel like a lot of bands these days don’t have a particularly compelling live act,” Toledo said in a 2016 interview. But it’s also worth pointing out that most of the ’90s legends Car Seat Headrest are compared to were notorious for their non-committal stage presence, and Commit Yourself Completely has no qualms about a classic rawk heft that, say, Pavement or Guided By Voices could only embrace with irony or heroic beer consumption.
CSH have the makings of a durable live institution. Toledo’s catalog spans over a dozen albums with songs that push past 10 minutes or more, and he’s clearly not against toying with them, live and in the studio. But Commit Yourself Completely offers the exact setlist one might expect from an hourlong set at Coachella or opening for Interpol or Death Cab for Cutie: eight of its nine tracks are culled from Teens of Denial and Twin Fantasy, and none would be considered a “deep cut.” There are no new verses, no extended solos, no unexpected covers or interpolations, no clues into what Toledo says he learned from studying James Brown and Swans’ Michael Gira as bandleaders. “Fill in the Blank” imagines Toledo in a muscle T rather than an oversized suit; “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales” is strangely sluggish for what was intended to be a compilation of the tour’s most “fun” performances, and neither illuminates the studio original.
The only outlier is a cover of Frank Ocean’s “Ivy” that’s popped up on setlists since 2016, treated with the deference one would expect after Toledo yearns to have the guy’s voice earlier on “Bodys.” While Toledo wisely avoids trying to emulate Frank Ocean’s vocals, there is an authorial voice shared between these two—a modern way with confessional tropes, a fondness for clever diversions and meta-commentary, informed by social media’s seemingly divergent aims of oversharing and content curation. Considering how Twin Fantasy and Monomania were Toledo’s longform conceptual explorations of queer sexual awakening and unrequited love, it’s possible he’s been trying to write his own “Ivy” for years; it’s also not impossible to think of the influence Toledo might’ve had on Ocean, a guy who’s shown a clear affinity for indie rock oddballs. For all of Commit Yourself Completely's intentions to recast Car Seat Headrest as a live juggernaut, the only essential cut finds Toledo at his most familiar: a solo performer giving the listener unfiltered access to his creative process.
