Are My Earbuds on the Fritz?
Finally catching up with Car Seat Headrest's 2020 album Making a Door Less Open
Tallahassee is a tough place for seeing good live music. There will be the occasional nostalgia act that passes through and plays at some of the venues we’ve got around town. But if you’re interested in (I never know how to put it… indie? good? meaningful?) music, the pickings get very slim. The Mountain Goats have played here a couple times (which makes sense since they have an album entitled Tallahassee) and we’ve had shows by Wilco and Jeff Mangum since I’ve been here. My point is that when you get one of these shows, it feels like a true event. That was certainly the case when, in the spring of 2018, Car Seat Headrest played a show here.
It was probably the best show I’ve seen since I’ve been here in Tallahassee (Mangum and Mountain Goats were maybe higher quality shows given the power of their lyrics, but just by their own nature they can’t rock like Car Seat Headrest).
Thus Car Seat Headrest putting out a new album was something of note as they did with Making a Door Less Open two years ago. Talking about an album released two years ago might seem… a little strange. But two years ago was right in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic (peak pandemic) and the mental bandwidth it took to make one’s way through that did not leave a lot of room to spend time with oddball indie rock records. It slipped through the cracks. Now that we’ve moved past that time, or into a different stage at least, I was able to sit down and spend some time with that album.
What I found when the needle ran out on the record was something that left me wanting, especially after his last three albums (Teens of Style, Teens of Denial, and the re-recorded Twin Fantasy) grabbed my attention.
“Can’t Cool Me Down” and “Hollywood",” two of the singles off the album, both feel very underdeveloped in a way that’s not just a lo-fi/DIY aesthetic in action. One feels like there’s not enough while the other feels like too much. “Weightlifters,” the opening track, suffers a little from this though the hook that propels the song is more interesting and saves that track. Will Toledo, who “is” Car Seat Headrest for all intents and purposes, is someone who comes out of that Steven Malkmus/Robert Pollard mode where their lyrics are the music delivery system rather than something to be labored over (though perhaps I need to do more of that/would appreciate this album more if I did). Thus I’m more fixated on the sound rather than pouring over the lyrics (like I would with someone I’ll bring up a little later in Father John Misty).
One track that did stand out in a good way was “Life Worth Missing.”
It features some lyrics that I found worth returning to.
Fall over the edge
Learn to live while falling
Every laugh is a path worth following
When you put it into words
It's comfortingly bland
There's so little left to understand
But the instrumentation of the song, its melody, is really what puts it a cut above. While some of the electronic-infused moves on other tracks don’t quite work, on “Life Worth Missing” Toledo is able to draw on those sounds to make something that’s lush and beautiful and melancholy.
But while that’s a strong track that made its way onto my ever-growing Best of 2020 Mix on Spotify, the album itself was lacking. If more of the songs were like “Life Worth Missing” it would’ve been a great album but alas. For a band that was very much on my radar, this was a disappointment.
Toledo seems to be yet another major indie figure (Father John Misty would follow this path as well) who took a hard turn against what made them so great. Whenever this happens, I feel a certain degree of conflict within myself. I feel as though artists should have the freedom to do whatever they want. A musician shouldn’t feel as though they have to keep doing the exact same thing that made them famous or gave them a wider platform. But it’s also frustrating when an artist can do something so well and then decides not to do that. For Toledo, it’s hard to hear him steer away from what he did on “Bodys,” which is one of the great indie rock songs of the past few years.
I’m still interested to see what’s next for Toledo and I’d enjoy seeing them play live once again but after spending a little time with Making a Door Less Open I cannot help but think about how I wish this album was more in line with where they’d been.
Being on I-10, I would've assumed Tallahassee would "benefit" from being on the way/to from other stops on a tour (in the same way Fargo might). I didn't realize that it was just far enough east that most groups would've already headed north before they got there.
More importantly, hopefully you're out of harm's way w/Ian? Watching the weather radar at work, it looks like it's tracking pretty far south of you, but still...