Edison Review of the Maccabees Church Group Toledo
Car Seat Headrest is the pet project of prolific ring military camp-er Will Toledo. His 'proper' debut, December's 'Teens of Style' was a compilation of re-recorded songs that served as an introduction for a wide audience. Now, only a few months later, we take his showtime release of brand new fabric since signing for a label, 'Teens of Deprival'. As its title suggests, the album is closely linked to its predecessor; Toledo is still painfully self-aware, yet painfully obsessed with his own bloodshed and all the same painfully cocky-indulgent. While the records are clearly twins, they are twins with different personalities and interests. Information technology's more of a straight up stone tape than 'Teens of Manner' – information technology's got a cleaner audio, the riffs are thicker and deeper, the bass is creamier and the arrangements are by and large less quirky and distracting.
Some of these songs tell relatable narratives about growing up and some serve straight up lyrical unloading and venting. Toledo is a fine storyteller and frequently blurs the line between fiction and autobiography, to the disarming bespeak where y'all're never quite sure of his sincerity or motives. Almost halfway through the epic 'Ballad of Costa Concordia', a suspension upwards ballad that focuses on personal psychosis, Toledo starts singing Dido'due south 'White Flag' and doesn't end till he's sung the whole chorus. It'southward a breathtaking moment, not least because 'White Flag' is a brilliant vocal that rarely gets heard anywhere these days, and about the terminal thing you lot expect to hear it is on a Auto seat Headrest vocal. Really though Information technology speaks to Toledo's willingness to play with his audition's expectations and the tunnel vision that seems him doing exactly what he wants, how he wants.
On 'Fill in the Blank' he has a conversation with himself, moaning about *fill up in the bare* before putting himself dorsum in his identify – 'you have no right to be depressed, you haven't tried hard enough to like information technology!' This is Automobile Seat Headrest'southward opening gambit, and the album gets no less conflicted as it rambles on. On 'Vincent' he takes sadistic pleasure in the unpleasant hordes of tourists that flock to his college town every summertime. On 'Joe Gets Kicked out of School…' He rattles through the pros and cons of drug utilise with some of the most on betoken lyrics about the subject I've ever heard. At another point he ponders his ain incompetence past using an extended metaphor relating to the sinking of the Costa Concordia (a disaster largely believed to have happened due to the negligence of the ship's captain). This is only how Will Toledo'south encephalon operates, he'southward forever contesting his ain anxieties and thinking of unusual ways to relate that experience.
As smashing as 'Teens of Denial' is, it is frustrating at times. In the good ol' 1980s, the decade to which Toledo clearly owes and then much, 'Teens of Denial' would have been a great twoscore infinitesimal, 8 track album with a scattering of really good b-sides to go with it. The songs would accept been trimmed in length by necessity. Perhaps it'southward a sign of the times as much as anything else Toledo sings about that this is such an indulgent tape. Nearly every track could stand up to lose a minute or two and twelve of these songs in a row is just as well much when they are this crammed with ideas. After nearly nine minutes of 'Cosmic Powers' you become eleven minutes of 'Costa Concordia' followed by six more than minutes of 'Connect the Dots'. The 2d half of 'Teens of Denial' is merely exhausting, and that holds it back for being a truly classic 21st century stone record.
Taken in smaller doses, it's nevertheless one of the most thrilling things you volition hear all year. Whip-smart, self-deprecating, funny and likeable, Toledo has one of the near distinctive lyrical voices in gimmicky indie. The anthology'southward best lyric comes during a reflective moment on the otherwise barbarous 'destroyed by hippie powers.' "What happened to that chubby little kid who smiled a lot and loved the beach boys?" He could have left that as a rhetorical question, hanging in the air – the song's glorious harmonies would have hinted at the answer (he never really left). Instead he provides his ain answer; 'what happened is I killed that fucker and I took his proper noun and I got new glasses.' Like much of what Car Seat Headrest does, the line is overkill (he's even annotated the lyric on Genius.com to provide context) but it'due south also brilliant. The challenge in futurity volition be learning to refine his wilder instincts without dampening the bright idiosyncrasies that ascertain Automobile Seat Headrest.
8.5/10
Source: https://thomasmj99.wordpress.com/2016/06/25/car-seat-headrest-teens-of-denial-review/
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