Discussion: The New Car Seat Headrest Album Is Pretty Good
Blog's resident Car Seat Headrest experts talk 'The Scholars,' dad rock, and Bowie wannabes
By Sloane DiBari and Benjamin Rosielle
Last month, in anticipation of Car Seat Headrest’s 13th studio album, The Scholars, we wrote this article where we debated whether the band has fallen off. Now, we’re revisiting that question, and both of our answers have changed…kind of.
On the day of the album’s release, we held a listening party with two other people (including Blog’s own Zoe Stern) using a pair of astoundingly mid Bluetooth Logitech desktop speakers, and discussed as we listened.
I’m (Sloane) not sure about Ben, but I went in completely blind — Fern Slater, also of Blog, texted me to tell me that she liked the new record, and I was very quick to tell her not to say anything more so I could have the most unbiased opinion possible, because I am not normal about Car Seat Headrest. I held my breath all day, and was relieved to find that The Scholars was pretty good. Even Ben liked it.
After a few days of relistening and developing our opinions on the album, we sat down for the penultimate beautiful Rat all-day breakfast of the year, poised for a lively discussion about the hot new gay furry rock opera, set up with these tiny, cheap bluetooth mics you hook up to your iPhone. Very professional. Like those people who write The Discussion in the Opinion section of the New York Times.
After about half an hour we realized that the mics hadn’t been turned on. Awkward! But we kind of remember what we were saying, so here’s an interpretive adaptation of that conversation in writing.
SLOANE: So do you still think Car Seat Headrest has fallen off?
BEN: Despite my many reservations about The Scholars, I can’t say that Car Seat Headrest has fallen off. After I first heard “The Catastrophe,” the last single for the album, my strong negative opinion on The Scholars started to turn around and I think my tone in the previous article would’ve been a lot softer if that single had come out before we wrote it. I’ve actually come around to “CCF” being a great song, which I think I listened to for thirty seconds before skipping the first time I heard it. For coming in with such low expectations, I’m happily surprised about the album in its entirety.
SLOANE: My expectations were met but not exceeded. The singles are definitely the best the record has to offer, and maybe “Reality,” too. “CCF” and “The Catastrophe” are instant classics, right up there with the best tracks on Teens of Denial. “The Catastrophe” is especially great. Will Toledo is a pretty excellent pop songwriter. The more power pop-adjacent songs are a refreshing return to form. They’re really building on the good old-fashioned guitar rock sound they went hard on with Teens of Denial. There’s a kind of dad-rockification going on here that works well for them. I remember you were talking about Bruce Springsteen when we were listening to this on Friday. Springsteen wouldn’t have come to mind for me without you bringing him up, but now that you have, I can totally hear it, especially in “Equals” and “True/False Lover.”
That said, I don’t think Car Seat Headrest is particularly good at doing the whole Epic Prog Rock thing. And I generally don’t like Ethan Ives as a vocalist. The prevalence of his vocals was my least favorite artistic choice on this record.
BEN: The dad-rockification of Car Seat Headrest is here in full force, and personally, I am here for it. If Teens of Denial was music for 40-year old dads, then The Scholars seems to appeal more towards the 60-year old dad crowd with its nods to various strains of 70s rock. This album definitely succeeds the most with songs like “The Catastrophe” or “True/False Lover," which is somewhat disappointing because power pop isn’t exactly treading new ground for them, although it’s something they can clearly still do excellently. The Bruce Springsteen heartland rock thing is a sound that suits them very well—I’m comparatively lukewarm on the David Bowie influence that permeates a lot of these tracks, mostly because I’m more of a Springsteen fan to begin with. I really hate the title of “Lady Gay Approximately” because Will Toledo is not Gay Bob Dylan and he should know better than to make that kind of pun at the ripe old age of 32. I wish Car Seat Headrest would be able to make something without me feeling the need to compare them to other artists, but they’re making it very hard for me to not do that.
The whole prog rock shtick feels really weak to me because even though they’re all talented musicians, no one in this band is good enough at their instruments to write compelling extended instrumental passages. It feels like Car Seat Headrest is trying too hard to sound epic and dramatic because The Scholars is supposed to be a rock opera, even when the sound doesn’t really work for them. Frankly, the long songs don’t have a whole lot of consistent drive to them, which makes them impossible to pull off satisfactorily.
I’m also disappointed in Will’s bandmates, who are all severely lacking in artistic presence compared to Mr. Car Seat Headrest himself. Seth Dalby, to his credit, knows his place as a lowly bassist and doesn’t really try to do much beyond hit the bass notes. MaDLO was the Andrew Katz record, and we’ve all seen how that turned out. The Scholars, then, is the Ethan Ives record (at least going off of the Paste article). Ethan Ives can hit the notes, but I think he lacks presence and charm as a vocalist (and, honestly, as a guitarist too). Why didn’t you like Ethan Ives as a vocalist?
SLOANE: Not to bring up RateYourMusic in real life, but I saw someone on RateYourMusic say they don’t like it when people other than Will Toledo sing Car Seat Headrest songs, and I feel the same. But I’m not sure how to articulate exactly why that is. Ethan Ives just has this really strange inflection that I find off-putting. He enunciates his vowels in an almost disquietingly contrived way. He sounds like he’s squeezing syllables out of his vocal cords with an iron grip, but he’s also kind of trying to be David Bowie, but he’s also trying to be Stephen Malkmus, but then he’s also trying to be Dave Matthews? It just doesn’t work. I will say that his parts on “Reality” have grown on me with a few more listens, but I still can’t get down with his sections on “Planet Desperation.” It’s frustrating because that song has so many powerful, genuinely sublime moments. Like that one riff you were talking about, the one that was great for, like, thirty seconds before it disappeared.
BEN: This record is definitely full of a lot of great moments that don’t really go anywhere and are bogged down by plenty more awkward parts that don’t work at all. For an album that was recorded in analog by the same band that self-produced Twin Fantasy (Face to Face), the production can feel thin and lacking at times, particularly in the guitars. There are moments on The Scholars that genuinely sound awesome, but there are a lot of passages in the longer songs that feel flaccid and directionless, a problem that I’ve had with this record since the first time I heard “Gethsemane.”
SLOANE: One point of contention seems to be Will Toledo’s vocals. Fern (from Blog!!!) was saying his vocals were one of her favorite parts and that she thinks he’s become a much better vocalist since his last record. But then Lily (who really liked the record and said it was one of her favorites from Car Seat Headrest) was complaining that he wasn’t enunciating his words enough, and that it kind of diluted her appreciation of the music because Will Toledo’s lyricism is what distinguishes Car Seat Headrest as one of the great indie rock bands of our time. I think you have a lot more hard, technical knowledge about music than I do, so I want to know your thoughts.
BEN: Will’s vocals on The Scholars have really grown on me since I first heard “Gethsemane.” I’m a sucker for flat, monotone, indie-guy vocals, and Will Toledo has been successfully leaning into that style since he started Car Seat Headrest. Now, they feel far more rich and active than before, something I was initially skeptical about because they’ve changed so much since the early Car Seat Headrest records that I love. Despite this, I still think his vocals have lost some of the expression and charm that was present in his early work, such as the screaming in the 2011 version of “Beach Life-In-Death” which you had brought up as an example in our initial conversation about this record. Will’s vocals on this album feel somewhat contrived to me. A lot of the vocal lines are stilted and jumpy in a way that contributes towards this record feeling awkward and kind of dorky, although that aspect of The Scholars has grown on me as well.
SLOANE: What do you think of the band really pushing for everyone to read the liner notes in conjunction with their listening to the album? I don’t really have any thoughts more articulate than, like, it’s cool. It’s different. I still haven’t been able to find them anywhere, but I’m curious to read them. I wonder if they would give me a new appreciation for the album.
BEN: I can’t force myself to care about The Scholars enough to even have a mild interest in seeking out the liner notes. I generally find extensive liner notes to be too self-indulgent, and The Scholars isn’t an exception. I do find the whole furry-college-rock-opera concept of the album to be dorky in a very charming way, particularly considering that everyone in the band is around 30.
SLOANE: Okay, so our final evaluation of the record. I think it’s pretty good. It’s a substantial improvement from Making a Door Less Open, but still decidedly not on par with Teens of Denial, Twin Fantasy, or How to Leave Town. I have hope for Car Seat Headrest, though. It’s clear that they’re still growing into being an active band again after COVID and Will Toledo’s evil illness, but the direction they’re going in seems promising. They have not fallen off. What do you think?
BEN: Car Seat Headrest haven’t fallen off, but I think that I’ve fallen off Car Seat Headrest. An essential part of Car Seat Headrest has always been that their music is steeped in referentiality. Not only does Will Toledo love referencing and revisiting past songs and projects, Car Seat Headrest’s music and lyrics are full of references to and interpolations of music that Toledo loves: if you use a somewhat generous definition of the word, there is not a single Car Seat Headrest album that doesn’t reference another song or musical artist. Teens of Denial, with its (aborted) references to Pavement and The Cars serves as a sort of End Of Indie Rock History album (note that I am not claiming The Cars are indie rock). If Will Toledo is the Francis Fukuyama of Indie Rock, then his thesis is that there is no more stylistic innovation to be had, and the best we can settle for is loving pastiche of past art. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it’s a big part of why a lot of people (including me) love Car Seat Headrest. It’s a sentiment, however, that has grown off of me with time. I can’t help but feel like The Scholars fails to meaningfully grow out of the shadow left by Car Seat Headrest’s previous work both in terms of its reliance on sounding like something (Springsteen, Bowie, etc.) and in the quality of the songs themselves, which pale in comparison to past Car Seat Headrest epics such as “Beach Life-In-Death” or “Boxing Day.” I’m not saying that Will Toledo and company are lost just yet, but I think they took the wrong turn a couple miles back and none of them quite seem to realize it.
I will need to listen based on the Bruce reference!
You say the album is pretty good but most of the discussion here is how it kinda sucks, is kinda boring, has too many cringey they-hard elements (“contrived”), and lacks the exuberance that characterizes much of Toledo’s pre-MADLO work. CSH has thoroughly fallen off IMHO.