Living Here, Everyday: Car Seat Headrest
Teens of Denial is a big, bold album about things that feel transient and slight, like being alive in the midst of intense depression. “It doesn’t have to be like this!” Will Toledo says on “Drunk Driver/Killer Whales”, trying to convince himself as much as anything. There’s a warm fuzz surrounding every track of Denial, a clear path from the indie rock of the 90’s, everything from Dinosaur Jr. to Beck. But this album, as much as it shares sonically with older acts, wasn’t built for people grew up listening to them. “ “It’s the new economy,” Toledo sings on “The Ballad of the Costa Concordia,” “we have nothing to offer and we sleep on trash.”
Like many artists these days, Car Seat Headrest is an state of constant production. Future puts out mixtape after mixtape, it hasn’t even been a year since the last CSH album, Teens of Style. As good as that album was, Teens of Denial sees the band leap in a way that maybe only people who have grown up in this moment, one where the world can collapse around you at any time, can accomplish. Think about the way Kendrick Lamar grew from Section.80 to Good Kid, M.A.A.D City: the complexity of his vision somehow doubled, and his emotional focus somehow deepened. An artist always capable of evoking a feeling has realized the ability to create a world. That’s what Car Seat Headrest is doing on Teens of Denial.
On Denial, that world is depression and Toledo is working through a thousand cuts and a thousand death, each time to be reborn and to worry about death all over again. Take the moment between “Fill in the Blank” and “Vincent,” the album’s 1–2 punch of an opening. “Fill in the Blank” tries to reconcile American individualism and depression and can’t do it, because that form of individualism is a myth whose standards rise in our heads from one impossible plateau to another to the extent that we’re on the verge of electing a man whose power is his ability to convert wealth into racism and vice versa. Toldeo, faced with two impossible forces, chooses the route taken by Javert in Les Miserables, an exit. “I’ll hold my breath, I’ll hold my breath, I’ll hold it, I’ll hold my breath” as the music slows to a hilt. This is it. There’s nothing.
And then, movement. A jut outwards and then quickly inwards again, and then it starts to repeat itself, a quick play into Steve Reich’s avant-garde that extends itself for almost two minutes. Ambient sounds start to build up around the repetition, becoming increasingly hard to ignore until the repetition ultimately changes to meet their demands, kind of like life! “Vincent” is focuses on how the pain discussed in “Blank” can’t really be communicated to an outsider. “But hey, I’m living here, every day!” Toledo says with some mixture of pride and panic. He eventually settles on Van Gogh’s Sorrowing Old Man (At Eternity’s Gate), a painting Van Gogh made two months before his death, generally thought to be a suicide by gunshot. A doctor told Van Gogh as he was dying that he could save his life and Van Gogh said, “Then I’ll have to do it over again.” “Pure sadism!” Toldeo cries. “Pure sadism!”
But he does do it over, and then over again. There’s the overwhelming “Destroyed By Hippie Powers,” a track that calls to mind the mysticism of Guided by Voices, bogged down by beers that give Bob Pollard life. Drugs are common players in the life of Denial, building up and tearing down. “Last Friday, I took acid and mushrooms/I did not transcend, I felt like a walking piece of shit/in a stupid-looking jacket” Toledo says on “(Joe Gets Kicked Out of School For Using) Drugs With Friends (But Says This Isn’t a Problem)”. It’s a funny line because it’s so direct, a dynamic Toledo plays with regularly. He laughs at himself, sure, but is there really anything funnier than hearing “Good people give good advice / get a job, eat an apple, it’ll work itself out,” as he says on “Just What I Needed/Not What I Needed”?
It’s also big in the sense that there’s but a single track under four minutes, it’s also big in that it’s chock full of one-liners, things that maybe you’ve felt in your life but couldn’t put a handle on. “It’s an unforgiving world, but she’s not an unforgiving girl” Toledo sings, briefly channeling Springsteen or Craig Finn. “You and me are connected now / we were in one photograph and we don’t even look happy” he says at another point, briefly staring into the digital abyss.
If rock music started as exploration of the individual (the hero’s journey of Johnny B. Goode, “I can’t get no satisfaction”) indie rock, borne out of frustrations with the excesses of decades past and continuing forward despite all common sense and eye rolling, is about something communal. The idea of indie rock is predicated on feeling a sense of direct communication, that there are fewer barriers in the world than you thought they were. People get this type of feeling from all sorts of art, of course, but when Will Toldeo says things with all of his heart, like “You have no right to be depressed / You haven’t tried hard enough to like it” it can feel like he’s writing inside your brain. Whatever connection people feel with any sort of music these days, there’s room for Car Seat Headrest.
