Label: Matador
Release Year: 2025
Listen: Spotify / Apple Music
It’s taken me a while to get to this review. Which is typical, but also not. After all, how do you listen to a rock opera or concept album in one sitting? Especially one where track six and seven are both eleven minutes long, followed by track eight at almost nineteen minutes! It’s intimidating, but also challenging in terms of life windows. Not that this is surprising given Car Seat Headrest’s penchant for theater. But beside the thematics, there is something different about this record. Something more interested in building something classic. I’m not going to say it’s The Who or anything, but there is certainly a base made of some Killers and elements of Springsteen soaring Americana. I know, it’s not what I expected either.
Car Seat Headrest used to be a solo project for Will Toledo. And then he formed a band and the whole project became something that sounded more like what you’d expect from an indie rock endeavor. That’s good. But along came 2020’s Making a Door Less Open. A regression, in my opinion, into some sort of EDM nonsense that felt more like an indulgent personal project than a cohesive urge to make new and better music. I didn’t fuck with it. That was five years ago. So, when I saw this record come out all these years later with this absolutely tragic album cover, I was worried. Would it be Japanese jazz? Brazilian tropicalia? Oldey-timey British pub music? I had to risk it eventually. And so I did. And, let me tell you, when track one, “CCF (I’m Gonna Stay With You)” starts off its eight-minute jaunt with some almost Peter Gabriel, world music prog thing with its oddball mix of Spanish and French lyrics I was worried. But then the thing just downshifts into a fist-pumping, anthemic good time. It’s a surprisingly decent song, and one that shows the aspirations of this album in full force.
And I’m sure this’ll be an unpopular opinion, but despite the wacky run times and the obvious attempt to do something that might be just beyond their ability in some cases, this is a really good record. I said it and I’m sure that makes me annoying or pretentious or just dead wrong. But you like what you like. It’s no longer the nineties when ambition is frowned upon and ridiculed. So I won’t shit on Toledo and crew’s desire here to make something ambitious. Something that upon multiple listens sounds pretty cool and, in parts, really keeps you guessing. With interesting applications of varying musical styles and song structures across the album and sometimes within the same song. Ms. Hipster and I were listening to Sirius in the car this week and heard a couple Paul McCartney and Wings songs and noticed the way he’d stitch multiple songs into one. I mean, have you listened to “Band on the Run” recently? What a bizarre tune — one that could have been three different hits if he didn’t make a pastiche of it. While not quite the song that one is, Car Seat Headrest certainly went for a similar thing with their eleven-minute track “Gethsemane.” Ambition, man.
Yes, it’s an interesting and somewhat indulgent swing on a song like “Reality” when you do your best Bowie ballad imitation in an eleven-minute indie prog thing — and by imitation I mean like a true attempt to sound like a song written in the style of David Bowie — but even their somewhat derivative, idol-chasing stuff is well made and worthwhile. Alright. Okay. Admittedly a nineteen-minute tune is going to have its ups and downs. It’s obnoxious, for one. But what else to do we want or expect from our non-punk indie artists these days? Who says songs need be short and sweet? In this case, they could have had some more selective editing, but I don’t fault them for just going for it. Again, not everything can hit — but it’s tough when you’re like, “I really like minutes two through six and twelve through sixteen of that song. The rest I could skip.” Because that’s not how music works. And then they wrap it up with a rollicking rocker. A record that is a long and affecting listen if for no other reason that it’s an entertaining curiosity. Something completely antithetical to 2025 and the bite-sized nonsense that so much media seems to live on. Songs written just for their hooks to be promoted on Tik Tok. Singles and commercial jingle fodder. I may be too dim and too distracted to really get the concept here, but I can appreciate the effort and enjoy the ride.
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