Anyone wondering how things have changed in the world of lauded US alt-rockers Car Seat Headrest might consider the four years that separate Making a Door Less Open from their last album of new material. Ordinarily there would be nothing unusual about that gap – but in the first four years of Car Seat Headrest’s existence, its mastermind, Will Toledo, released seven albums (one of them a two-hour double), four EPs (one of them as long as an album) and two compilations of outtakes. That’s more than 150 songs and 12 hours of music: a lo-fi spewing forth of ideas that won Toledo a cult following, which then grew exponentially, both in size and rabidity, when he recruited a band and signed to the august US indie label Matador.
The recent decrease in output, plus Toledo’s decision to perform on stage and be photographed wearing a gas mask and hazmat gear – current events making the latter a substantially less cute idea than it might have been – aren’t the only things that separate the 2020 model of Car Seat Headrest from its previous incarnations. For all his endless, patient explanations that the muffled sound of his early releases was a matter of resources rather than aesthetics, Toledo’s music has thus far existed in the venerable rackety US alt-rock tradition of Pavement and Guided By Voices. Making a Door Less Open, however, was inspired by the band’s “comedy” EDM/hip-hop side-project 1 Trait Danger. Fans of the band’s old style are occasionally thrown a bone – the scruffy guitars of Martin, the acoustic What’s With You Lately? – but the album is better represented by the fluorescent synth lines of Life Worth Missing, which is apparently an attempt to “[compete] with some of the other new pop or hip-hop acts at Coachella,” as Toledo’s label boss put it.
This is a path plenty of other rock artists, from Paramore to Tame Impala, have previously taken, but here it represents a dramatic shift in thinking. 1 Trait Danger is, after all, a joke, and you can’t miss the sneering tone it takes towards the music it parodies: there’s something insufferably smug about its combination of indie scene in-jokes about Pitchfork and Mac DeMarco and the wilfully horrible racket it sets them to. Meanwhile, on Making a Door Less Open’s Weightlifters, a song that dates back to 2015, the usual millennial angst found in Toledo’s lyrics is abetted by hearing some pop music while out shopping: “It’s the sound of machines / of quarters crushed into pennies.” Perhaps it sounds a note of ambivalence about aspiring to a wider audience – either way, it yields decidedly mixed results.
At its best, Making a Door Less Open demonstrates that the kind of melodic facility audible even on his murkiest early recordings is a movable feast – as amid the droning synths of Deadlines (Thoughtful). And it takes the standard building blocks of mainstream pop and rearranges them into something idiosyncratic. The slickness of Can’t Cool Me Down’s minimal 80s pop is unsettled by Toledo’s ragged vocal, and the bridge in which a reference to Emile Zola is backed by what sounds like someone distractedly noodling on a child’s toy keyboard. Hymn (Remix) offers up an engagingly weird interpretation of the wobbling basslines of brostep and pop’s penchant for AutoTune, the latter warping Toledo’s voice into a particularly pained-sounding shape.
But at its worst, the album lands with a dead thud, as on single Hollywood, a conflation of guitar and raw-throated rapping in which the spirit of 1 Trait Danger seems rather too evident, self-consciously wacky shrieked vocals and all.
There are strong songs between these two polarities, but nothing approaching the kind of cast-iron anthem that would guarantee the mainstream success the album hints at craving. Its main problem is its anonymity. Deadlines (Hostile) and There Must Be More Than Blood are perfectly enjoyable, but it’s hard to avoid the sense that Car Seat Headrest have wandered into the realms not of pop but of standard-issue mainstream rock, sanding down their ramshackle USP so far that the songs could be by any number of bands. It doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to picture Deadlines (Hostile) performed by the Killers. That’s obviously not a crime, but you do wonder if it’s what they were aiming for.
The question of what Car Seat Headrest were aiming for hangs over an album defined more by what it isn’t than what it is: neither balls-out, show-me-the-money capitulation to market forces, nor boldly experimental enough to count as a disruption to a mainstream form; neither disaster nor triumph. There’s something scattered and awkward about its grafting together of ideas that don’t gel; the sound of a band who have outgrown their initial incarnation but aren’t quite sure what they want now.
This week Alexis listened to
Surprise Chef – Blyth Street Nocturne
A dearth of new releases gives you time to uncover stuff you’ve missed. Hence Surprise Chef’s charming 2019 attempt to conjure the spirits of David Axelrod and Isaac Hayes on a tight budget.
