in Review

Car Seat Headrest – Teens of Style (2015)

It seems that a number of these 2010s albums I’ve been reviewing this month weren’t originally reviewed on Mildly Pleased when they came out because they were released right before the artist became really big. Teens of Style is one such album, though it was more of an album recorded to catch up any budding fans that hadn’t listened to Car Seat Headrest before the band signed with Matador Records. As a prelude to 2016’s Teens of Denial, Will Toledo rerecorded all of his old songs that he’d recorded in college under the Car Seat Headrest moniker and released on bandcamp. This is how Teens of Style was born. It wasn’t the first time Toledo would mine his past for better recording techniques (see 2018’s reimagining of Twin Fantasy), but it was the first time a lot of listeners were introduced to this distinctive new voice in indie rock.

I’m hesitant to call Car Seat Headrest the definitive indie-rock act of the late ’10s, but they do embody a lot of things that seem built for our times. First off, there’s the band’s origins in self-released internet music, which also gives the band some connection to the “bedroom pop” label that’s been stuck on a lot of recent indie artists. Then there’s the fact that Toledo rarely puts up different barriers between rock’s past, as he’ll pull from R.E.M., The Cars, and Daniel Johnston all in the same song. Some of his songs will take on lo-fi intimacy, while others will be sprawling and epic. Which just shows that he’s less narrow in his expectations of what rock music can be, unlike in generations past.

I still have never listened to the bandcamp Car Seat Headrest albums, so I can’t really compare how the versions of the songs on Teens of Style compare to their original versions. Though I can say that there is something remarkable about how the songs sound polished enough to not feel like the work of an amateur, but they also still feel rooted in their lo-fi origins. “Maud Gone” is a particularly good example of this, as it uses this cheap-sounding drum machine, discordant keyboards, and too-echoey vocals as its basis. But by the song’s end, its sonic pallet has been rebuilt with actual drums and horns into something that sounds gigantic.

Car Seat Headrest also feels indicative of 2010s indie rock because despite having a decent amount of crossover success, it’s hard to see them ever becoming that big. The 2010s saw decidedly less indie rock bands having success on the scale of say, a Modest Mouse or Franz Ferdinand in the 2000s, but there were a fair amount of bands like Car Seat Headrest that broke out without ever having a break-out hit single. That said, if Teens of Style proves anything, it’s that Toledo has no problem mixing plenty of sounds with more traditional rock influences, and as far as his creativity goes, the sky’s the limit.

Favorite Tracks: “The Drum”, “Times to Die”, “Maud Gone”