Will Toledo’s latest album Twin Fantasy. (File)
Though Will Toledo initially released Twin Fantasy with his band Car Seat Headrest independently on bandcamp back in 2011, he has now shared a completely re-recorded and reworked version of the collection. Released by Matador Records, Twin Fantasy runs 10 tracks in length.
Toledo is an intriguing figure: the 11th album is a re-recording of his sixth, given extra oomph and proper production now that Car Seat Headrest has evolved to become a muscular, exciting rock band. The album has some changes — Nervous young inhumans has a new set of lyrics— but generally this is about pulling the album into sharper focus.
The album is an ambitious song cycle that’s been held up by his small but fervent online cult as his masterpiece. The songs explore in painful detail the narrator’s infatuation with a nameless man, a relationship that Toledo has said was based on his own experience. It was written when Toledo was 19, and the album is dense with confusion, anxiety and self-doubt, though the self-laceration is characteristically cut with laughs. And whether or not it fits the criteria of a concept album proper (there isn’t a clear narrative from song-to-song), Twin Fantasy feels much like an album about a single experience.
Aside from an offhand comment about an ex or two, there are only two people in every song — the person singing, and the guy to whom it’s addressed (“Most of the time that I use the word ‘you’/Well you know that I’m mostly singing about you,” Toledo sings in Nervous young inhumans). If the person delivering the lines wasn’t so funny, the level of obsession might be a little scary. But Toledo pulls off an album with a jarring degree of specificity that touches on feelings familiar to almost anyone who has experienced young desire and heartbreak.
Over the 13 minutes of Beach-life- in-death, he tries to unpick his confusion and bitterness and resentment, with swoops into devastating clarity: “I pretended I was drunk when I came out to my friends/ I never came out to my friends/ We were all on Skype/ And I laughed and I changed the subject.” There are times when the less charitable might be inclined to shout at Toledo to pull himself together, but Car Seat Headrest increasingly feels like a significant band, and Toledo like an unusual and compelling voice.
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