Review: Car Seat Headrest’s Making a Door Less Open Is Dizzyingly Uncategorizable

Overflowing with adventurous new ideas, the album opens up infinite new paths for the group to follow going forward.

Car Seat Headrest, Making a Door Less Open
Photo: Carlos Cruz

Will Toledo may now be in his late 20s, but his smart-alecky deadpan ensures that he continues to sound like an adolescent. And like the precocious teenager he was when he first started releasing music under the Car Seat Headrest moniker, he’s maintained a voracious appetite for new influences, new experiences, and new aspects of himself—and for stuffing as many of those discoveries as he can into his music. Musically and lyrically, Making a Door Less Open, the band’s first album of entirely new material since 2016’s Teens of Denial, belies Toledo’s perpetual state of transformation and exploration, resulting in a set of dizzyingly creative and often uncategorizable songs.

The most obvious shift is the album’s clear debt to EDM and hip-hop music. Toledo has toyed with electronic elements in the past, but after signing with Matador Records in 2015, he’s employed a more guitar-heavy sound. In an artist statement released by the label, he explains the left turn as being influenced by 1 Trait Danger, a collaborative side project between Car Seat Headrest drummer Andrew Katz and Toledo’s new gas mask-clad alter ego, Trait.

The search for new identities runs throughout Making a Door Less Open, starting with the opening track, “Weightlifters.” “I woke up and felt like shit when I saw my ordinary face,” Toledo opines, necessitating a change: “I believe my thoughts can change my body.” It helps his case that Car Seat Headrest sounds completely transformed: “Weightlifters” is furiously grooving dance-rock, stylistically far afield from the band’s previous work but as adrenaline-inducing as anything they’ve ever done. The song epitomizes and justifies Toldeo’s unorthodox approach to recording the album, wherein the music is interpreted both electronically and more traditionally by the full band—including Toledo, Katz, guitarist Ethan Ives, and bassist Seth Dalby—before then being combined. Most of the time, it’s not possible to distinguish where the electronica ends and the rock ‘n’ roll begins—which is as it was intended.

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Toledo spends the rest of the album chasing new beginnings as he runs from demons of one kind or another, from performance anxiety to toxic relationships to self-doubt. On “Can’t Cool Me Down,” he chants a desperate, primal chorus that could have come from an old blues song, if not for all the samples and synths. He insists he’s “only made one mistake in my life,” pleading for redemption. He finds it On “Martin,” in a lover who inspires him to change his life: “Just when I think I’m gone/You change the track I’m on.”

“Change your mind/Night to night,” Toledo intones at the end of closing track “Famous,” perhaps the most euphoric song ever written about isolation and depression. And he seems to have taken his own advice, as he compiled three different versions of Making a Door Less Open for vinyl, CD, and digital platforms, all featuring slightly juggled tracklists and alternate versions of several songs. The experimental bent of some of these alternate versions can be jarring, but as Toledo puts it on “Life Worth Missing”: “Every path/Is a path worth following.”

Inspiration can apparently come from anywhere, even early-aughts rap-rock and Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy.” But not all of Toledo’s experiments are successful: The vinyl version of “Hymn,” which toys with modal harmonies over a distorted church organ drone, is a bold and sophisticated piece of music whose subtleties are completely erased on the electronic remix that appears on the digital version of the album. (The vinyl also features the best of three versions of “Deadlines”—a happy medium between the bland rock-oriented version and the overcooked EDM version, which both appear on the digital edition).

But the sheer amount of surprises on Making a Door Less Open makes up for a misstep or two. Even the most—and really only—prototypical slice of guitar pop on the album, “Martin,” boasts a busy arrangement that ping-pongs between acoustic and electric, topped off with pitch-shifted vocals and an unexpected Latin-inspired trumpet line. Overflowing with adventurous new ideas, the album has opened up seemingly infinite new paths for Toledo to follow going forward.

Score: 
 Label: Matador  Release Date: May 1, 2020  Buy: Amazon

Jeremy Winograd

Jeremy Winograd studied music and writing at Bennington College, where he did his senior thesis on Drive-By Truckers. He has written for Rolling Stone and Time Out New York. He and his wife met on a White Stripes message board.

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