CAR SEAT HEADREST - TWIN FANTASY VINYL (2LP GATEFOLD)

Release Date: 16th February 2018

 

The prolific young indie-rocker Will Toledo, aka Car Seat Headrest, returns to scene of his first record, originally recorded in 2011 when he was a mere nineteen years old and still recording on a laptop, to finish what he started. Toledo throws the proverbial indie-rock kitchen sink at the new version giving it the time and care it deserves resulting in another triumphant album from him which is as mad as it is meticulous, as catchy as it is crazy, and as epic as it is exquisite!

 

"Will Toledo always knew he would return to Twin Fantasy. He never did complete the work. Not really. Never could square his grand ambitions against his mechanical limitations. Listen to his first attempt, recorded at nineteen on a cheap laptop, and you’ll hear what Brian Eno fondly calls “the sound of failure” - thrilling, extraordinary, and singularly compelling failure. Will’s first love, rendered in the vivid teenage viscera of stolen gin, bruised shins, and weird sex, was an event too momentous for the medium assigned to record it. On the heels of the smashing success of Teens of Denial, Car Seat Headrest releases a new version of Twin Fantasy. “It was never a finished work,” Will says, “and it wasn’t until last year that I figured out how to finish it.” He has, now, the benefit of a bigger budget, a full band in fine form, and endless time to tinker. According to him, it took eight months of mixing just to get the drums right. But this is no shallow second take, sanitized in studio and scrubbed of feeling. This is the album he always wanted to make. It sounds the way he always wanted it to sound. It’s been hard, stepping into the shoes of his teenage self, walking back to painful places. There are lyrics he wouldn’t write again, an especially sad song he regards as an albatross. But even as he carries the weight of that younger, wounded Will, he moves forward. He grows. He revises, gently, the songs we love so much. In the album’s final moments, in those apologies to future me’s and you’s, there is more forgiveness than fury. This, Will says, is the most vital difference between the old and the new: he no longer sees his own story as a tragedy."