With his band Car Seat Headrest, Will Toledo has constructed the perfect vehicle for his obsessions. Since its inception in 2010, it’s become a highly referential project with a series of related album titles (2015’s Teens of Style preceded 2016’s Teens of Denial) and nods to other songs and bands from the Cars to Modest Mouse to They Might Be Giants. But the connection he makes to the music of others is nothing compared to the density of the internal references. A chorus from one song might show up as the bridge in another; a lyric might connect to an observation made earlier in the record, or even the record before. And Toledo’s constant tinkering goes beyond hiding Easter eggs; he also revisits older recordings until he gets them right. Teens of Style consisted of re-recorded versions of songs culled from his vast catalog (he put out nine releases on Bandcamp before signing to Matador). And now he has taken that re-make/re-model impulse even further.
The new Car Seat Headrest album, Twin Fantasy, is a completely re-recorded version of an album that Toledo originally released in 2011. There’s not much precedent for this sort of do-over—if this were film, say, it’d be like Steven Soderbergh re-making Sex, Lies and Videotape, which I could actually see him doing at some point. But Toledo, two years after his last batch of new songs, apparently believes enough in this album to think that he can make a better version of it to share with the wider world.
Twin Fantasy isn’t just another one of Toledo’s Bandcamp albums. It’s an ambitious song cycle that’s been held up by his small but fervent online cult as his masterpiece. The songs explore in painful detail the narrator’s infatuation with a nameless man, a relationship that Toledo has said was based in part on his own experience. It was originally written when Toledo was 19, and the album is appropriately dense with confusion and anxiety and self-doubt, though the self-laceration is characteristically cut with laughs. And whether or not it fits the criteria of a concept album proper (there isn’t a clear narrative from song-to-song), Twin Fantasy feels very much like an album about a single experience. Aside from an offhand comment about an ex or two, there are only two people in every song—the person singing, and the guy to whom it’s addressed (“Most of the time that I use the word ‘you’/Well you know that I’m mostly singing about you,” Toledo sings on “Nervous Young Inhumans”). If the person delivering the lines wasn’t so funny, the level of obsession might be a little scary. But Toledo pulls off an album with a jarring degree of specificity that touches on feelings familiar to almost anyone who has experienced young desire and heartbreak.
Toledo’s narrator in Twin Fantasy wants to get so close to the object of his affection that they essentially fuse together, but all he can think about is everything that’s pulling them apart. He sees images of his beloved everywhere (“When the train came it was so big and powerful...I wanted to put my arms around it”) while suspecting they’re too fucked and damaged to make it work (”We were wrecks before we crashed into each other”). He writes about watching movies and taking drugs, relays a story about coming out to his friends while pretending to be drunk, notes that having a body can be a drag. The story he tells is not about what happens, but what almost happens, what he wants to happen, what he wishes didn’t happen. The present moment is always undercut by a memory or a wish; strictly from reading the lyric sheet, it’s never entirely clear if the relationship is something real or something that is happening in Toledo’s head. The promise of pleasure is washed out by feelings of dread.
This makes Twin Fantasy sound grim and somber, but it’s actually the opposite. The explosive arrangements and Toledo’s delivery make it much more of a dark comedy. Brilliant individual lines pile up (”My soul yearns for a fugitive from the laws of nature” is a line that Silver Jews’ David Berman wishes he wrote), but the record’s real genius is in how the songs simmer and then burst, in perfect sync with the arc of the feelings. Early highlight “Beach Life-In-Death” stretches over 13 minutes, an epic meditation on raw want and jet-black self-loathing (”I am almost completely soulless, I am incapable of being human…it should be called anti-depression, as a friend of mine suggested, because it’s not the sadness that hurts you, it’s the brain’s reaction against it”) with instantly memorable screamed choruses worthy of the finest power pop.
“Bodys” has the gleaming pulse of the Strokes, and finds Toledo commenting on the song in real-time as it unfolds—“Is it the chorus yet? No. It’s just a building of the verse, so when the chorus does come it’ll be more rewarding”—and then it delivers on that observation, with layered vocals that bring to mind the stacked harmonies of ELO. The songs never stay still, for better or worse, they’re always in the process of building up or breaking down, which makes this jagged tail feel even more restless.
Some will find it shocking that an even lower-fi version of this album exists. The production values are somewhere on the lower end of inexpensive mid-tier indie rock, but the meat-and-potatoes sonics ultimately serve to make the record sound timeless. Give or take a Skype reference, it could have come out in 1994. It’s hard to know how the faithful who have been living with this album for half a decade will take its reinvention. Given the force of the music, the improved sonics give it greater weight, and the existence of two versions somehow makes the whole thing even more interesting—fading memory reflected and then re-assembled—and it’s hard to hear this re-visit as anything but a triumph. Twin Fantasy is not a perfect record—the latter half is bogged down by soundscape-y passages and spoken word, for one thing—but that only validates it as a powerful document of teenaged pain and longing.
