Ultimate Music Media Trolling: 1 Trait Danger x Car Seat Headrest’s “1 Trait High”
The electronic comedy album helmed by CSH drummer Andrew Katz defies Pitchfork and hilariously critiques the industry
by Katie Ingegneri
On the morning of Friday, February 16, 2018, I did an emotional deep-dive into Twin Fantasy, the newly released and reworked version of Car Seat Headrest’s 2011 album of the same name. The original album had been made back when young songwriter Will Toledo was mostly just a band of one, coming from an era of singing his vocals to a headrest in the back of his parents’ car, and became an early cult favorite for the Bandcamp-based indie rock songwriter.
Today, Car Seat Headrest includes drummer Andrew Katz, bassist Seth Dalby, and guitarist Ethan Ives. The group became an indie darling as soon as Car Seat Headrest put out their first official release on Matador Records, and each subsequent album has been met with critical acclaim. Upon the release of the updated Twin Fantasy, it was immediately met with an 8.6 rating and “Best New Music” from Pitchfork…which also called it “Twin Fantasty” in its image graphic headline before being corrected.
On the evening of Friday, February 16, 2018, I spent the rest of my day laughing to a new album on Bandcamp called 1 Trait High, by a group called 1 Trait Danger (or stylized with variations as 1TraitDanger). This time, Andrew is the mastermind, with Will, Seth, and Ethan as his supporting cast. And god, is it good shit. At least an 8.6 on the Pitchfork “Fantasty” scale.
The album is a self-referential, meta-modern, comedic, electronic/rock odyssey that ties together Andrew’s funny videos on Instagram and Twitter, Will’s songwriting, their relationships as members of a touring band, and their rising star as a critically lauded indie rock group who won over the likes of Pitchfork from the very start — but it’s precisely the cultural hegemony of Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and related music media that 1 Trait Danger is critiquing. It’s funny as fuck, and it shows that not only can the dudes of Car Seat Headrest create great music and enhance Will’s songwriting vision, Andrew can also guide the group’s truly epic trolling and the development of creative venues beyond their “serious” indie project — and even beyond music and social media.
1 Trait High is a journey that features, among other things, jocks being bullied by nerdy hackers, partying “in the back of my dad’s SUV,” alien boys, Obama, Jimmy Fallon, being beaten up by Norm MacDonald, physical altercations with your friend’s dad, and this year’s Mathlete tournament — it’s basically Andrew’s social media presence in the form of a 10-song album. But what makes it really special is how it hits on multiple levels beyond the funny vignettes and tripped-out club beats; how this group is the only band that gets the prestigious “Best New Music” from Pitchfork the same day as releasing a track, the album kickoff “Interlude 1,” where their drummer is yelling from the point of view as his “Pitchfork News” persona Tim Schenectady about bedroom rap sensation 1 Trait Danger, who has somehow hacked into Pitchfork’s command center:
“How did these guys get on the playlist? What the hell is going on? This is not part of the set list…what the fuck? This was supposed to be WHITNEY, Mike! This was supposed to be Vampire Weekend! This was supposed to be Perfume Genius — the good shit! Somebody get Mike in here right now!…We’ve been fucking hacked again! This is going to RUIN Pitchfork! This is going to ruin ME!”
1 Trait has hacked in and starts to rock out, but is interrupted by his mom (Andrew) yelling down the stairs. “Get upstairs and help your father — there’s mustard…everywhere.”
As Andrew explained on The Indieheads Podcast the day of the release, “Tim Schenectady is a reporter for ‘Pitchfork News’ that doesn’t know how to read…[he] was created as a way to talk shit about journalism as a whole, and especially music journalism. He is the embodiment of what music journalism has become.” He says that the 1 Trait Danger project is 99% work from being on the road, and lists comedy music like Tenacious D and “Weird Al” Yankovic as inspirations.
Andrew and the band have also since launched DirtPlug TV, home of Tim Schenectady (unclear if DirtPlug TV is Tim’s new launch after leaving “Pitchfork News” or if he still belongs to both), and a full-on parody of music media websites — on which he expanded his Instagram interview with Mr. Will Toledo to include an alternate text version, and also reviewed 1 Trait High, panning and raving about it as “sublime but also dreadful.” (EDITOR’S NOTE, 6/28/18: I later discovered that this was a rip on the fact a writer going by the name of “Matt the Raven” for Under the Radar magazine panned Twin Fantasy itself with the same phrase in a review.)
1 Trait High shows that the Car Seat Headrest crew, while making “serious” music that is putting them on the fast track to becoming indie royalty, do anything but take themselves too seriously. The album’s second track, “Saturday’s For The Boys (Saturday is for The Boys)” reads to me as the outright Car Seat Headrest parody track, with a long parenthetical title, morose lyrics about loneliness and “all the kids at school told me that I’m gay today,” turning into a complex mashup of synthesizers and guitar solos, and culminating in a singalong chorus. (The album cover of a personified dog is also a direct callback to the dog-related cover and themes of Twin Fantasy.) Nobody hacks Car Seat Headrest (or Will Toledo) better than 1 Trait Danger (or Andrew Katz) — but more on this later.
Then there’s a hacker bully named Cossett who bullies 1 Trait into giving him all his Bitcoins (“that’s all my Bitcoin for lunch, man!”) and runs him over in his pickup truck, while also haranguing him about his apparent jock tendencies. “I bet you deadlift 200 pounds and you’re really healthy, you fuckin’ nerd. When was the last time you coded in Python, you jock bitch?” And my favorite song on the album might be the demented teen party anthem “DROVE MY CAR,” where we find out that 1 Trait is in fact “the coolest kid in your middle school, G” because “I’m in seventh grade, and I’m 15, and fuck you” — starting a party in the back of his dad’s Cadillac SUV, complete with an array of drugs and electronic dance music.
Andrew is a talented electronic musician beyond killing it on the drums for Car Seat, which is certainly half the battle for making a comedic album that doesn’t suck musically. And this album lives at the intersection of just about every subculture of teens and beyond — hackers, jocks, musicians, partiers, nerds. Is it the perfect album??? Possibly. At any rate, it’s probably making Andrew reach God status with the teen boy demographic. (Although I’m a 30-year-old woman, so the weird appeal of this album is definitely broad.)
The track “Unique” tackles the issue of originality in music — “you are not unique, everything you’ve done has been done and will be done again,” which obviously calls to mind the legal issues Will has run into as a remixer and sampler of music (The Cars fiasco with Teens of Denial), with the somewhat profound conclusion that “being unique is not as fun as you’d think.” It functions as a meta-commentary on the fact that Will is one of the foremost remixers and samplers of music, including his own, throughout his career thus far. This shit is seriously deep.
The album reads to me as what happens when a group of multi-talented music dudes smoke weed, play video games, and dick around in the off-hours on tour, and have to find creative ways to make each other laugh and keep their energy up as they tour across the globe — and in this realm Andrew is in charge. Whether fleshing out songs that originated in his or Will’s Instagram videos that only superfans will recognize, or earning confusion and disdain from the non-comedic music media when they dropped “Stoney Bologne” last summer and billed it as a “diss track” (and was subsequently covered by the aforementioned Pitchfork as a serious response to some music troll, on top of making Stereogum’s 40 Worst Songs of 2017 list), Andrew, Will, and the crew can balance being indie darlings without feeling any restraint on their comedic (and still creative) outlets.
But I also finally understood something else as a Car Seat Headrest superfan:
Will Toledo x Andrew Katz: A Powerful Creative Bromance (A Word That Sucks But Somehow Keeps Being Relevant)
As I simultaneously absorbed 1 Trait High and deep-dove into Twin Fantasy, I realized that I was understanding more of the jokes, a fact that my True Car Seat Headrest Fan Club co-founder was somewhat incredulous about, as she had properly absorbed the original 2011 Twin Fantasy while I fell in love with Teens of Denial and How To Leave Town back when we were descending into our fandom and starting our Facebook page about the band in the summer of 2016.
But each album basically serves as Easter eggs for the other — the seriousness and literary-influenced brilliance of Will’s songwriting and way of setting up his songs on the vinyl insert (such as “Bodys” which features the parenthetical “(on a need-to-know basis)”) are cleverly mirrored in the 1 Trait song “Oh Actually,” on which Will makes a vocal appearance during one of their comedy vignettes about a Mathlete tournament, and Andrew riffs on “need-to-know basis” until it becomes “do you know my bassist?” (You can hear a slightly different version of Andrew and Will doing this at the end of the actual Car Seat Headrest song.) And Will says, “you better not be working on that fucking ‘Need-to-Know Basis’ song.”
Andrew is credited as “1traitdanger” on my shiny Twin Fantasy gatefold vinyl, next to Will as “the nonbeliever.” 1 Trait has hacked Car Seat Headrest — Pitchfork’s “the good shit” from “Interlude 1,” as it were.
These two albums act as a strangely perfect companion pair, even though superficially they are nothing alike (apart from being made by the same group of people). Perhaps like Will and Andrew in real life. Maybe there is no Will without Andrew, and no Andrew without Will. If Will is known as the enigmatic intellectual boy-genius, Andrew’s persona is pure clever, impulsive energy. And together, their projects hit all the right notes (lol). Not to get too serious about an album like 1 Trait High, but it’s made me realize the Will-Andrew dynamic is really what powers their creative life together in both of these projects. #breakthrough
Maybe Will and Andrew embody the yin and the yang of what it means to be a “serious” indie artist, and the modern necessity for artists of keeping up with the world of social media (and engaging with it however they see fit), in relation to a music media that writes articles in real-time about whether Father John Misty and Kanye West left or rejoined Twitter that day. (And a music media that never misses an opportunity to let Will get away with voicing his own opinions on his Twitter without turning it into mega drama, in the form of ostensibly “serious” music journalism.)
But to go back to the Indieheads podcast, where Andrew traced the origins of his and Will’s relationship getting together as musicians just jamming and ultimately becoming bandmates, but claimed that “Will still doesn’t think I’m ‘The One,’” Will affirmed their “love” later on Twitter:
If Andrew and Will had never met, introvert-type Will might not have been able to make such a potent leap from Bandcamp DIY darling and patron saint of people who spend a lot of time online to indie rock god on the verge of taking over the world, without Andrew’s extroverted energy on the drum kit and off. And now, thanks to Andrew, 1 Trait Danger is becoming an integral meme component of what it means to be a Car Seat Headrest fan — they even released a limited run of Bitcoin-shaped flash drives with the album, a lyric zine by Remy Boydell, and a ton of hacker shit that I’m going to need all my fellow fans on the Internet to help me with cause I am not a hacker. (I also have listened to this album so much that I can’t hear the words “hack” or “hacker” now without thinking of 1 Trait.)
As a music fan, Car Seat Headrest freak, and someone who studied a lot of cultural theory stuff in college, I just can’t get over the fact that these dudes are able to present the world with two totally disparate yet deeply intertwined pieces of art. And yes, I am calling 1 Trait High art, okay. Whereas Twin Fantasy is a beautifully epic, dense sprawl of a sonic novel that requires a serious time and attention commitment to fully absorb on all intended levels (although just rocking out works too), 1 Trait High is the roughly half-hour, non-self-serious companion you can keep on repeat in the background.
I just love to think about how those at Pitchfork and other corporate media outlets who are tasked with the supposed “seriousness” of music reviewing would contort themselves to discuss it. But these indie darlings are daring you, Tim Schenectady, to fucking go for it. With the launch of Dirtplug TV, 1 Trait Danger is already becoming a multi-media satirical force to be reckoned with — and I can’t wait to see where they take it from here.
I woke up this morning with a mix of Car Seat Headrest’s “Nervous Young Inhumans” alternating with 1 Trait Danger’s “Connected Schenectady” in my head. This is truly the content I am here for. I want 1 Trait Danger to open every Car Seat Headrest show from now on. Please don’t beat me up, you can have all my Bitcoins.
