Will Toledo isn't old, but he's feeling his age. He's in debt; his friends are getting married; his hands are frozen; he's stuck in the city; and worst of all, his songs are starting to sound the same. The world is moving past him, blurring into formlessness, and his music as Car Seat Headrest is an attempt to slow down and make sense of the rush.
Teens of Style is technically a compilation, comprising songs dating back to 2011 that were re-recorded for his Matador debut. (Teens of Denial, a planned 2016 release, will be his first Matador album of entirely new material.) You can hear the revised sound as a composite of the label's history: Guided by Voices' ear for cracked pop oddities, Belle and Sebastian's emotional directness, Yo La Tengo's intimate approach to jamming, Stephen Malkmus' ability to get wordy without forgetting to rock out. As a songwriter, Toledo is both present and detached, capable of living in a moment while floating above it. A self-summarization comes on the brawny "Strangers", when he deadpans a series of autobiographical quips: "Car seat is a menace to the public," "Car seat is a genetic stop sign," "Car seat's nervous and the lights are bright."
On that song, we find out the young Toledo fell in love with Michael Stipe: "I took lyrics out of context and thought, 'he must be speaking to me.'" His confusion over purposefully abstract lyrics may have turned him into a literalist, someone endeavoring to explain every twist and turn of his interior state. His lyrics are rapaciously intelligent, with a knack for wry humor. Take a lyrical adjustment on the new recordings, for example, that reflects the shift in his life status: "Times to Die" swaps a couplet about sneaking his way to musical success into a meditation on the existence of a higher power, like God or (even better) Matador founder Chris Lombardi ("Got to have faith in the one above me/ Got to believe that Lombardi loves me"), who will help decide whether or not Toledo is destined to be a cult hero.
Teens of Style has a noticeably jagged quality; unbelievably, it used to sound even DIY-ier. (The original versions can be found on Car Seat's Bandcamp.) The new recordings retain their rough edge, but there's luminescence in the production—the percussion is crisper, the guitars are brighter, and Toledo's singing is a lot more pronounced. The effect is an album that's bookish, but not sedentary. He sells abstruse metaphors and lyrical concepts with every ounce of himself, like failing to do so would mean the end of the world. In this way, he's a cousin of artists like Joanna Newsom, Bright Eyes, or Okkervil River, who never let their prodigious literary intelligence get in the way of crafting something you might actually enjoy listening to.
To (sort of) quote Brandon Flowers: He's human and rocker. The existential despair of "Something Soon" is crystallized in a blown-out chorus, while he uses a hypnotic keyboard line to make the haunting "Maud, You're Gone" a prom song for moody kids. A spectral choir comes through a radio at the start of "Sunburned Shirts" before breaking into a scratchy pop gem, like George Harrison on anti-depressants ("I haven't looked at the sun for so long/ I forgot how much it hurt to"). Toledo's voice is weary, and carries a shred of desperation—he sounds like a third-generation cassette tape recording of Julian Casablancas (who, otherwise, is his complete opposite as a frontman).
Earlier this month, I went to a Car Seat Headrest show held as part of the annual CMJ Music Marathon, where dozens of bands go to make their reputations. But Toledo began the set lying on the floor, with his microphone angled toward the ground, as the band launched into "The Ending of Dramamine", a 14-minute epic where he references Modest Mouse and sings about only thinking about himself. If you weren't standing right at the stage, you couldn't see him. The words flowed from the void, sung by someone so overwhelmed by the moment he would rather disappear. I couldn't absorb them all at once but what I remember is the crowd standing on their toes, edging their way forward, hoping to catch a glimpse. Then, he stood up.
