Point/Counterpoint: Has Car Seat Headrest Fallen Off?
Blog directors and seasoned Car Seat Headrest scholars Benjamin Rosielle and Sloane DiBari go head-to-head in this exclusive debate.
By Sloane DiBari and Benjamin Rosielle
It’s hard to pinpoint when Car Seat Headrest fans started to debate the claim that the band has fallen off. Some diehard Bandcamp-heads hold strong in the belief that Will Toledo sold out when he signed to Matador Records, and that Car Seat Headrest has been on a decline since the shift from Will Toledo Lo-fi Bedroom Solo Project to Real Actual Professionally Recording Indie Rock Band. Other fans — and this is the position that we’ve seen the most — believe that the band’s 2020 critical flop Making a Door Less Open was the beginning of the end. Some diehard Toledo apologists, however, do actually like MaDLO (?????), and think the band has never hit any kind of rough spot, much less fallen off.
Personally, I (Sloane) hate MaDLO and the god-awful supplemental EPs that followed its release, but I’ve always had faith that my man Will Toledo and his (mostly) trusty bandmates would be able to bounce back from their flop era. After five years, I’m holding out hope that they’re really going to do it. The first two singles for their upcoming record The Scholars are some of their best work since Twin Fantasy (2018). “Gethsemane” is admittedly a little nerdy and gimmicky for my tastes (my girlfriend – this is paraphrased – said that it “sounded too much like the soundtrack for someone’s D&D campaign”), but enjoyable nonetheless, and “CCF (I’m Gonna Stay with You)” recalls my second-favorite CSH record Teens of Denial while bringing in exciting new electronic influences. I am choosing to believe in the divine power of the Real Actual Indie Rock Label Matador Records Furry Rock Opera, but my co-director Ben has different opinions.
I, Benjamin Rosielle, have zero faith in Car Seat Headrest to bring any more new or interesting music into this world. Their falloff started long before Will Toledo made the fateful decision to sign to Matador Records. Every album since Monomania has been worse than the last, with the one exception of Teens of Denial improving over Teens of Style (which wasn’t hard to do). Following this logic, I expect The Scholars to be abysmal, and what little I’ve heard of the album’s first two singles only serves to prove me right. You should be embarrassed if you put the words “enjoyable” next to these miserable excuses for rock songs. It’s not just that Car Seat Headrest has fallen off: they have plummeted all the way from the pinnacles of My Back Is Killing Me Baby and Twin Fantasy (Mirror to Mirror) to the deep, hellish recesses of The Scholars.
Read on for a Point/Counterpoint–style debate (Sloane on Points, Ben on Counterpoints) that might yield some answers to the ultimate question: Has Car Seat Headrest fallen off?
Point: Okay, first of all, the claim that Car Seat Headrest fell off after they signed to Matador is, respectfully, fucking ridiculous. Teens of Style wasn’t the strongest start, but definitely not terrible. Teens of Denial is definitely their most commercial record, but that certainly doesn’t make it less authentic or creative or ambitious. “The Ballad of the Costa Concordia” is one of Toledo’s greatest feats of songwriting, and “Fill in the Blank” quite literally changed my life the first time I heard it as a teenager. Also, my hot take is that people only hate Twin Fantasy (Face to Face) because it isn’t completely and unrelentingly fucking miserable like (Mirror to Mirror) — which, make no mistake, I also love and think is incredible and one of the greatest records to come out of the whole extremely online Bandcamp scene.
Counterpoint: Actually, Car Seat Headrest’s decline began with their 2012 EP Starving While Living, which is (not coincidentally) when Will Toledo made the switch from using Garageband to Logic Pro. While everything they’ve released up to MaDLO has been fine, it has never come close to the glorious highs of Will Toledo’s Garageband-era bedroom project. Early Car Seat Headrest was willing to take proper risks, to go strange, to do things that sounded ugly and unfiltered and beautiful. Were the results frequently bad? Yes, absolutely. But what Will Toledo was able to achieve from 2010-2012 was a string of albums with some of my favorite songs of all time, with music that inspired me to start taking art seriously. His post-Monomania albums have never been able to do that for me.
“That’s what being an English major does to you.”
The reason I hate Twin Fantasy (Face to Face) isn’t because I think it isn’t sad enough, but because the production and performances take all the edge and intrigue out of the songs. The appeal of Car Seat Headrest has always been that it’s a little shitty, that Will Toledo is able to write these rock songs with cringe-inducing lyrics and unwarranted pretensions of literary quality (that’s what being an English major does to you), but that he somehow manages to pull it off in a way that is arresting and endearing. This is what (Mirror to Mirror) embodies to me. Even if I make a face every time I get to “Stop Smoking,” it's worth it if it means getting to the ending of “Bodys” or reveling in the way “My Boy (Twin Fantasy)” builds itself up from a booming drum pattern to a gorgeous, cacophonous wall of sound that would make Phil Spector himself proud. (Face to Face), by comparison, sounds clean, approachable, and ultimately hollow on the inside. Gone is the desperation in Will’s voice, the wonderfully sloppy, distorted drum parts and the delightfully cheap-sounding layers of guitars and vocal harmonies. By trying to sound nice, Car Seat Headrest stripped away what made them special in the first place. And yes, this gradual denuding of everything great about Car Seat Headrest can be traced back to Will Toledo’s fateful decision to start producing music on a high-quality DAW that actually costs money.
Point: Car Seat Headrest has definitely lost that original charm they had back when Will Toledo was recording everything on a shitty 2008 MacBook mic or whatever. But I think their post-Matador stuff still has that classic, super earnest, really pretentious, nerdy lyricism that makes Car Seat Headrest so lovable, and while the new direction they’ve been going in since signing to Matador lacks that specific early-Bandcamp flavor, it’s not completely devoid of charm or character — it’s just different.
“If you can’t handle the corn, get outta the field.”
But admittedly, MaDLO sucks. Like, really bad. Even my devout faith in Car Seat Headrest as a blue-haired gay transmasculine high schooler wavered with that one. But The Scholars sounds cool as fuck and the singles have been very promising. “CCF” starts a little slow but it builds to something completely amazing. It’s one of Toledo’s best vocal performances yet, and he hasn’t lost his lyrical prowess. Even the lyrics on MaDLO were good, though not as crazymaking as his previous work — but the lyricism was still decidedly its only real point of strength. “Gethsemane” is kind of corny but like, this is Car Seat Headrest. As a wise r/CSHFans user once said, “If you can’t handle the corn, get outta the field.”
Counterpoint: These singles suck so bad that I couldn’t even be bothered to listen to them for more than a minute before aimlessly skipping through. Does this mean that I’m shirking my journalistic duty? Perhaps. Do I care? No. These singles are what I imagine Teens of Denial must sound like to True Car Seat Headrest Haters: bland, meandering, purposeless white-bread indie rock that goes against everything good in the genre. Will Toledo, though he’s never been a great singer, sounds like a drunken, aimlessly moaning shell of his former self. There’s nothing to grab onto, as the singles seem to do absolutely nothing with their outrageous runtimes, which is concerningly uncharacteristic for a band that has produced such iconic 10+ minute songs as “Boxing Day” and “Beach-Life-in-Death.” As I skipped through “Gethsemane” in boredom, I couldn’t help but think of this line from Car Seat Headrest’s 2012 10-minute classic “Souls”: “Building towards a meaning that’ll never come.”
Point: Even if you don’t fuck with “CCF” and “Gethsemane,” you’ve got to hand it to Will Toledo. This guy is so respected and so good at what he does that he’s getting fucking MATADOR, who released such legendary records as Turn on the Bright Lights, I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One, and Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, to put out his gay furry rock opera. I know it’s annoying to harp on the whole gay furry thing, but come on. Gay furry rock opera on Matador Records is crazy. I can’t think of a single other person in the entire history of popular music who could pull that off. There’s got to be a really, really good reason for a label like that to have faith in backing such a creatively ambitious (and, to a lot of people, super fucking weird and alienating) project.
Counterpoint: If Matador Records is willing to put their money behind this absolute waste of a project, then there must be something in their tap water. Fuck Matador Records and fuck Car Seat Headrest for still making music. If they knew what was good for them, they would go on a tour where they only play songs written from when Will Toledo was a teenager. Unfortunately, they don’t have the clear-headedness and True Appreciation for Real Art that I possess, as the only True Car Seat Headrest Fan. If you disagree with any of my counterpoints, fuck you and stop listening to music. I will fight you in Tappan Square. Meet me at midnight. I’m serious.
Point: Okay ❤️yay ❤️