Car Seat Headrest: The Great Indie Leap?

Will Toledo is back, for his first proper LP of entirely new material in four years. Two years after the exceptionally remastered and reworked “Twin Fantasy,” it only makes sense that Toledo was eager to throw off the yolk of indie rock lofi fame and the expectations that come with being so embedded and associated with the genre. So, on their new album, Making a Door Less Open, Toledo dons a mask as the new alter ego “Tron,” in an attempt to lend his new album an arty, technological mystique, somehow adhering to his lofi indie mysticism and also moving away from it.

The music within certainly follows suit: with a newly enlisted producer and a wholly different approach to mastering and instrumentation, Car Seat Headrest embraces rock and roll, EDM, R&B, and indie, sometimes all in the same song. They’ve moved in a new sonic direction to escape their former selves, and what made them famous. However, and this is the central problem with Making a Door Less Open: what direction was that exactly?

The new album as a whole feels quite scatterbrained and meandering, with some half-baked sonic explorations that don’t stick like they should. “Hymn - Remix” is the most obvious example of sonic exploration, with its programmed, almost drum-and-bass percussion style and fragmented lyrical work, sounding like a mixture of something you might here off of Radiohead’s experimental vocals on Kid A, but more danceable and less engrossing.

The intentionality in the song is elusive - I didn’t know whether to dance, listen to the lyrics, Toledo’s voice, or whether it was all meant as something cohesive and whole. The song certainly didn’t feel that way, as I was thrown off by the extremely plain, repetitive lyrics and frankly boring, static song structure. If they were going for EDM, the song should have at least been more catchy or danceable. This song could have served as a shorter interlude between “Hollywood” and “Martin,” but took up a oddly long chunk of time with the EDM-esque beats before transitioning into a light acoustic folk song soon after. “Martin” was a far better cut on the album, recalling the early work of the band.

The repeated themes of courage, longing, and queer love are a few of the themes that made me fall in love with Car Seat Headrest in the first place. Though it was certainly a pleasant song, it didn’t adhere to the relatively sonic exploration I heard on various other songs on the album.

Their most straightforward rock song, “Hollywood,” stands as the weakest cut on the album, with an overblown, overproduced guitar and drum track that left me wanting more catchiness and “hook” then Toledo provides. This, coupled with Toledo’s classic plainspoken lyrics don’t lend the song much listenability or heft, makes the song forgettable and repetitive. The lyrical content doesn’t do it any justice either; Toledo exclaims, “I'm sick of violence/Sick of money/Sick of drinking… Hollywood makes me wanna puke,” offering empty platitudes on the state of the world that don’t sound particularly original or thought-provoking.

Some sonic experiments pay off quite well. “Weightlifters,” the album’s opening track, serves as an invitation to their new sound, with a long intro characteristic of slow-builders like “Beach Life-in-Death.” The guitar work and singing style reminded me of some of my Modest Mouse tracks, and there are even lyrical nods to the band at the end of the song. Toledo sings about societal overwhelm and alienation, being stuck in a supermarket with swirls of emotion and sound, while he’s just there to buy some tangerines and “maybe grapes without seeds.”

Rather than moving in a new narrative direction, Toledo largely sticks to the stories that lent him outcast relatability: lost connections (especially with family members), love and loss (often with a specific man), and alienation permeate the albums 11 tracks. However, his songwriting often loses some of its potency. The stories of coming out on Skype and stealing alcohol from parents and grandparents made the adolescent wonder of Will Toledo so fantastically sad and emotionally impactful to listen to, but stories that appear on this album often feel like sanitized repetitions of previous material.

For an album that sounds like Car Seat Headrest wants to move on from what made them famous, it certainly doesn’t read like it. On the introspective “There Must Be More Than Blood,” Toledo sings, “I was living in the delta/Wasting most of my time/You know if I could close the blinds right/I could sleep all through the night,” referring to his desire to shut out an unaccepting world, including his family, and find some sort of peace and acceptance. These are certainly sentiments I could relate to, at least in part, but lyrics like these made think that an album that seemed like it was about moving on should overly dote on the past.

The fact that albums like these can make someone think so heavily about the context in which they were, and about the person who wrote them and their personal struggles, is a testament to Toledo’s abilities as a storyteller and songwriter. I just didn’t think this collection of songs was particularly strong or spectacular, and didn’t mesh together well enough to form something cohesive. Over all, I admire their shift in sonic direction, but believe that Car Seat Headrest have arrived at an impasse that many lofi or indie bands do after achieving some level of fame: do we continue the sonic direction that we became, or do we make the leap into new territory, unflinchingly? It seems that Car Seat Headrest made the leap, but kept looking back on the way down.

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