On their twelfth album, Car Seat Headrest venture towards a more refined sound whilst still maintaining their untamable inner pluralities.
More electronic, refined, and restrained than ever before, on their twelfth album, it feels as though we’ve caught Car Seat Headrest in an unlikely moment of transformation, wings half unfurled.
And yet somehow, the whole thing is still as sprawling as ever. Even the title, Making a Door Less Open, refuses to commit to a single certainty, ultimately proving that it is within the realm of the abstract and ambiguous that Car Seat Headrest most thrive.
Making a Door Less Open was created over almost five years, from the beginning of 2015 until the end of 2019. The album was actually recorded twice – once live and once with electronic instruments. The final songs are the result of a merging of these two versions.
Fellow bandmate Andrew Katz was heavily involved in the creation of the album and in a statement accompanying the release, frontman Will Toledo describes that most of the making of the album occurred between his and Katz’s houses: “[Katz] comes from an EDM school of mixing, so we built up sample heavy beat driven songs that could work to both of our strengths.”
Consequently, the songs are a pastiche of many genres, including EDM, hip hop, futurism, doo-wop, soul and rock and roll: “Each track is the result of an intense battle to bring out its natural colors and transform it into a complete work.”
Katz and Toledo have also created another project together under the name of 1 Trait Danger, a platform that has become an outlet for the pair’s outlandish and more humorous musical offerings. Yet, inevitably, the music and sentiments of 1 Trait influenced Car Seat Headrest.
In the context of 1 Trait, Toledo took on the alter ego of Trait, and now he’s decided to use it for Car Seat Headrest too. He’s also made the choice to start wearing a mask whilst performing. Toledo says that the motivation behind the decision is the nerves that he experiences whilst performing on stage, to which the mask serves as an antidote.
“If everyone is looking at the mask instead, then it feels like we’re all looking at the same thing, and that is more honest to me,” he describes. By drawing attention to the contrived nature of things, Toledo is trying to locate some kind of honesty.
Beginning with a long drawn out note joined by electronic high hats, album opener Weightlifters deals with the process of ageing: “I believe/Thoughts can change my body/It dawned on me/Your body can change your mind.” There’s a new sense of space and sparseness sonically, and synths are a new and prominent feature.
Speaking in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Toledo described, “‘Weightlifters’ is wanting to get out of the lethargy of an aging body, wanting to fine-tune things into a progressive state. And then the rest of the album is a counter against that. It really goes back and forth.”
Can’t Cool Me Down is one of the album’s highlights. The track is slick and electronic, driven by punchy programmed drums and watery synth tones, with Toledo’s nonchalant vocals effortlessly at home in these new surroundings. Part of the inspiration behind the song came from Toledo being frequently sick last year, and his subsequent desire to derive some kind of creativity from that state. He found the inspiration he needed in a text called Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich. The medieval book describes a woman who, whilst in a fever state, sees Jesus and ultimately experiences a kind of religious ecstasy whilst on the verge of death.
“You think you see a light but/There is nothing in a flame but fire,” Toledo sings, latter begging: “Cool me down.”
Deadlines (Hostile) and Hollywood lean into a sensibility more akin to The Strokes or The Killers than what we’ve previously heard from Car Seat Headrest, but it was a direction certainly hinted at in the 2018 re-work of Twin Fantasy. In the latter, overdriven guitar licks replay over and over beside equally distorted vocals.
Martin is another one of the album’s highlights, a track which finds an alluring mix of the electric and acoustic. When the electronic drums drop out for a moment, the scratchy acoustic guitars offer a flash of the Teens of Denial-era disarray, before the chorus (never to return again) hits hard with synth bass. Toledo’s layered vocals soar throughout with a series of anthemic melodies. In the breakdown, a wayward trumpet occupies a moment of lonely space, echoed upon the song’s close.
Martin is followed by the EDM track Deadlines (Thoughtful), and whilst the production is impactful, it signals an even greater sonic divergence than the songs that came before it, in some way feeling as though it belongs to entirely different album.
Whilst making the record, Toledo began to realise that he was more inspired by individual songs than he was entire albums. In noticing this change in the way he consumed music, he decided he needed to change the way he wrote it too. “I thought that if I could make an album full of songs that had a special energy, each one unique and different in its vision, then that would be a good thing,” he describes.
These sentiments are reflected by the fact that there actually exists two different versions of the album, depending on whether you buy it on vinyl or get the digital/CD version. This is because the vinyl iteration had to be delivered months before the other, and Toledo is someone who likes to tinker until the last minute. Consequently, the digital/CD contains later workings of the songs.
In many ways, this represents an ultimate elusiveness. Refusing to be any one thing, the album exists in numerous manifestations. Whilst Car Seat Headrest continue to evolve towards a more refined sonic palette, this prevailing ambiguity points to the very heart of what makes the band what it is. If you can submit yourself to it, it’s kind of a beautiful metaphor for being human – endless, ever-changing, and impossible to quite pin down.
Making a Door Less Open is out now, grab your copy here.
