Car Seat Headrest Live Out Their Classic Rock Daydreams on “The Scholars”
Photo by Carlos Cruz
Will Toledo has always taken a student’s approach to songwriting. Across his 13 albums both self-released and under Matador Records, he’s worn his influences on his sleeves while sloughing them off into a melting pot of rock ‘n’ roll cliches decades in the making. Thanks to a deadly combination of self-effacing wit, an almost unfair ear for hooks, and lyricism so confessional it often bordered on exorcism, records like Twin Fantasy and Teens of Denial became a part of the indie rock canon in their own right. In the former’s case, it did so twice! Even the scatter-brained Making a Door Less Open felt like an intentional left turn in the tradition of Toledo touchstones like Pavement with Wowee Zowee or Radiohead’s Kid A.
It was an ill-fated move however, as the record, designed to widen their audience through live shows, wound up releasing in the midst of a global pandemic. Fate only grew crueler when they got to tour it two years later and a run-in with COVID-19 led to an extended period of sickness for Toledo that effectively shuddered the group and caused the longest gap between studio projects in Car Seat Headrest’s history. To call this era a strange note to hang on for five years would be an understatement. The songs themselves eschewed many of the strengths that Toledo had built up over the course of a decade of songwriting, ranging from jerky synthpop to EDM dives and flirtations with outright butt-rock. It wasn’t without its charms, but they could be awkward substitutions for the emotional arcs and ironclad melodies that listeners had come to expect.
Album Cover via the Artist’s Bandcamp
One almost gets the sense that the band are making up for lost time on The Scholars, which not only returns to the hour-and-change runtime and music nerd hero worship, but takes it a step further with an honest-to-God rock opera. A full decade after coming together, the album finally makes good on the promise of a full-band effort in ways that its predecessor only did in pieces, with each member getting extended moments to shine and songwriting contributions. That it’s set in a fictional world of academia populated by anthropomorphic characters feels almost like the group cannibalizing themselves. This is the appeal of The Scholars though: four people coming together to indulge a lifetime of personal influences, obsessions, and demons. As a listener, you're either in or you’re out.
As with most rock operas, patience is key to getting the most out of The Scholars. Each track narrates the lives of a Parnassus University attendee and their individual crises of faith, complete with verses and backing vocals coming from different points of view per the album’s liner notes. I’ll spare most of the details of how each song contributes to the overall concept, in part because that’s much of the record’s fun and also because I’m still sifting through it myself, but even as Toledo’s own personal narrative takes a backseat, references to pop music history, religious texts, and the group’s own mythology should make any superfan feel right at home.
That being said, that same density will no doubt be a deterrent to those looking for some of the immediate pleasures of a “Fill in the Blank” or bluntness of TikTok favorite “Sober to Death.” A rock opera is an inherent leap of faith for the artist, with the more abstract narrative throughlines having the potential to obscure the very real emotions underneath. Take “Equals” for example, a track that probes some uncomfortable questions about the consequences of ‘cancel culture’ on its subjects and their relationships that are worth pondering. Its chorus of, “Without a defense I stand / And ask if there's something left to save / 'Cause what was the point of these hands / If they could give nothing but pain,” could be genuinely thought provoking, but when paired with the epic organs and marching beat, it feels a bit too much like Toledo getting on his soapbox for the nuances to fully resonate. Car Seat have always stood out from their bedroom pop contemporaries thanks to their outsized ambitions, so it feels a bit like dramatic irony that on a project of this size, they do occasionally get swallowed by them.
Thankfully, more often than not, the big swings do connect. The opening cut “CCF” soars in its arena-sized hook, with the impassioned “I’m gonna stay with you” radiating out of the speakers like sunbeams through storm clouds after four minutes of extended jams and building verses. “Devereaux” introduces the prominent theme of generational divides in a queer college student struggling to live up to his conservative family name by wrapping it up in a supercharged piece of power pop worthy of The Cars, while “Reality” explores the disillusionment that previous generations have passed onto their successors. It sees longtime guitarist Ethan Ives (also of Toy Bastard) engage in a slow burning back and forth with Toledo that plays out like a stretched out version of mutual hero David Bowie’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide.” Within the album’s framework, it’s a dirge for the missing narrator by his bandmates, but the loss of wonder and desperate clinging to broken dreams transcend the narrative more than other moment on the album as Toledo and Ives’ voices cry out “the earth fell out from under me” ad nauseam. Given the song’s title, it only seems right.
The themes of faith and family come to an apocalyptic head on “Planet Desperation,” which at 19 minutes, continues a Car Seat Headrest pattern of the penultimate track being the longest. A fever dream of pre-death visions and a new idea every two or three minutes with each and every member contributing vocals, the song absolutely should not work, but as with most of the band’s behemoths there’s always an image, refrain, or sound that reels the listener back in. The Scholars reaches its climax nearly fifteen minutes in, as Ives’ metal fascinations rip the track wide open with a titanic Iommic riff to give the finale some dramatic heft as Toledo interpolates the classic hymn “Amazing Grace” (yes, really) before bottling the themes up in a refrain so massive it makes you picture the cast of a theater production stepping out on stage to join hands as they sing it:
“'Til the kids grow up alright
Until hearts don't break anymore
Until we don't spend the rest of our lives fixing everything that happened before
Mothers, don't be scared when a son taller than you
With two oceans in his blood walks back into the blue”
Even amidst a torrent of idiosyncrasies and conceptual reaches, there’s at least a handful of moments that should appeal to every level of Car Seat fan. “Gethsemane” has a couple passages that should make anyone who fell in love with Teens of Denial’s 90s grit and endless grab bag of quotable one-liners crack a smile: “I can do whatever the fuck when I want to!” and “You can call the whole damn squad if you want to!” have exactly the kind of cathartic, dorky defiance that helped endear Toledo to swaths of teenage losers for more than a decade. On the other end of the spectrum, the most moving moment on the record might come from its most unassuming track, the largely acoustic “Lady Gay Approximately,” whose thinly veiled trans allegory starts heartbreaking but ends on a moment of hope and reconciliation that feels full circle from some of Toledo’s simplest and saddest songs. Even if the whole album isn’t for you, there’s bound to be a song or two that is.
In case it hasn’t been made clear, The Scholars is a lot, a record packed so full of ideas that it can’t help but catch a few contradictions in the mix too. It sees Car Seat Headrest at the furthest away from their lo-fi hero status, while also staying truer to their passions than ever. It can be exciting, exhausting, triumphant, and frustrating, often in the span of just a few minutes. As someone who has seen this group live five separate times and spun their records exponentially more than that, it is thrilling to hear Toledo finally realize his nerdiest, most supersized rock ‘n’ roll fantasies, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t feel like something’s been lost in translation. The bright side is that this project’s albums have often taken months for their hooks to seep into the brain and individual lines to take on more personal meanings, so only time will tell if it measures. For now though, to those devotees willing to put in the work, this text has enough packed in to reward them for years to come.
