Teens Of Denial
You have no right to be depressed You haven’t tried hard enough to like it There are two kinds of great lyrics. The first is the banger/anthem catch phrase: "Normal life is borin' / but superstardom is close to post-mortem." The second is more complex (and more rarely found): "Like a bird on a wire / Like a drunk in a midnight choir/I have tried in my way to be free" — with ideas, themes, and personae unfolding over the course of songs, contradicting each other, confronting the listeners' preconceptions, like Pete Townsend, Morrissey, or Kendrick Lamar. Will Toledo, the singer/songwriter/visionary of Car Seat Headrest, is adept at both, having developed them over the course of his eleven college-recorded Bandcamp albums and his retrospective collection last fall, Teens of Style. With Teens of Denial, his first real "studio" album with an actual band, Toledo moves from bedroom pop to something approaching classic-rock grandeur and huge (if detailed and personal) narrative ambitions, with nods to the Cars, Pavement, Jonathan Richman, Wire, and William Onyeabor. "I’m so sick of / (Fill in the blank)" or "It’s more than you bargained for / But it's a little less than what you paid for" are more than smart, edgy slogans. Over the course of Teens of Denial's 11 songs, Will narrates a journey with his mysterious companion/alter-ego Joe that addresses big themes (personal responsibility, existential despair, the nature of identity, the Bible, heaven) and small ones (Air Jordans, cops, whether to have one more beer, why he lost his backpack). By turns tender and caustic, empathetic and solipsistic, literary and vernacular, profound and profane, self-loathing and self-aggrandizing, he conjures a specifically 21st century mindset, a product of information overload, the loneliness it can foster, and the escape music can provide. “Fill in The Blank,” the mission statement of the album, kicks things off — it’s a fist-pumping anthem about feeling lousy in an ill-defined way, the fear of settling into a routine of futility, and not wanting to deal with it. Although it’s oddly joyful sounding, Toledo considers it the introduction to his angriest record yet. In that vein, “Vincent,” “Hippie Powers,” and “Connect The Dots” are about both fighting to hold your place in the crowd and to hold your drink, as well as DIY college house shows, and having no one to dance with, respectively. Initially similar, "Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales” veers off in surprising directions, each piece flush with huge, irony-free hooks. At the heart of the album sits the 11:32 "Ballad of the Costa Concordia," which has more musical ideas than most whole albums (and at that length, it uses them all). Horns, keyboards, and elegant instrumental interludes set off art-garage moments; vivid vocal harmonies follow punk frenzy. The selfish captain of the capsized cruise liner in the Mediterranean in 2013 becomes a metaphor for struggles of the individual in society, as experienced by one hungover young man on the verge of adulthood. Teens of Denial refracts Toledo's particular, personal story of one difficult year through cultural touchstones such as the biography of Frank Sinatra, the evolution of the Me Generation as seen in Mad Men and elsewhere, plus elements of eastern and western theology. The whole thing flaunts a kind of conceptual, lyrical, and musical ambition that has been missing from far too much 21st-century music. I won’t go down with this shit I will put my hands up and surrender there will be no more flags above my door I have lost, and always will be There are two kinds of great lyricists. The first kind is one one you find in books, canonized by time and a lifetime of expression. The second has it all in front of him. Meet Will Toledo. Or at least one version of him.
On Car Seat Headrest's first proper new album for Matador, frontman Will Toledo reaffirms that he is ahead of the pack as an imaginative singer-songwriter, capable of crafting dynamic indie rock.
In some ways, everything there is to know about Teens Of Denial can be found in the video for the record’s centerpiece, “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales.” The clip is deceptively simple: As frontman Will Toledo’s falsetto floats in, we see a road ahead. We’re speeding along in the darkness as passengers, buckled in to…
Will Toledo has been making melancholy slacker rock in his bedroom since 2010. He’s finally hit on the magic formula
DIY hero Will Toledo releases the witty and self-loathing Teens of Denial, his 13th album as Car Seat Headrest and second for Matador.
t's refreshing to hear such a guitar-heavy indie rock album capable of making an impact these days.
Will Toledo’s latest is enigmatic, a little deceptive in places, and thoroughly gripping throughout.
And though 2016's Teens of Denial isn't Car Seat Headrest's first album for Matador Records, this is the first one founder, frontman, and songwriter Will Toledo built from the ground up for the label.
Car Seat Headrest, the indie rock brainchild of Will Toledo, steadily developed from a series of lo-fi tracks recorded in his car as a teena...
There's little to be said about Will Toledo (Car Seat Headrest) that he hasn't already said about himself.
Will Toledo, the young creator of Car Seat Headrest, used to prefer anonymity, releasing 11 self-recorded albums on Bandcamp without pretense or assignation of image. His identification with slacker youth trying to find something meaningful to grab onto h