Review
Will Toledo learned the hard way about being careful for what you wish for. “I want to break something important”, he crooned over his breakthrough single Something Soon. Now, he has the chance to destroy the first 10,000 copies of the vinyl version of Teens of Denial, his new album for Matador, because of a major fuck-up with licensing rights. The entire situation forced him to rework the track Not What I Needed to remove references to The Cars’ Just What I Needed. The album’s most talked about track now ends with… Something Soon, but in reverse. The change had to be done quickly; while it was impossible to salvage the physical release date, the digital version’s one could still be met.
Thankfully, …show more content…
The new gear and studio time might therefore be one of the reasons Car Seat Headrest’s album #13 feels so big. Will Toledo isn’t afraid to let his songs breathe and evolve to their full potential: Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales has an average length here, running for over six minutes. The extra time allows him to fully tell his story of drunk driving his entire life until it ends making sense, all with a vicious tandem of hooks, each one led by an half of the song’s title. Meanwhile, The Ballad of the Costa Concordia stretches well over the eleven minutes. While it surprisingly shies from being the project’s longest song ever, it aspires to much greater heights than anything else that came before with its piano and brass …show more content…
It takes balls to write a rock album that goes on for 70 minutes, but it takes a lot of talent to fill them right and keep things interesting. For the first time, Will Toledo had an outside producer, Steve Fisk, to guide him, which might’ve helped the young musician. Opener Fill In the Blank is the kind of track that makes you want to pick up a guitar and start a band; it’s almost as if you can feel the crowd going batshit crazy life at the 2:56 solo. Still, the way he sums up teenage angst in just half of a chorus remains the most impressive feat. “You have no right to be depressed/You haven’t tried hard enough to like it/Haven’t seen enough of this world yet/But it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts”. Depression is a tricky theme to sing about, but the album never delves into whinny and cliché territory. Instead, Will turns to irony and bittersweet humor occasionally to let the tension off a bit like on Drugs With Friends: “Last Friday I took acid and mushrooms/I did not transcend, I felt like a walking piece of shit/In a stupid looking jacket”. And then he meets Jesus who gets mad at him. Of