Car Seat Headrest
The Scholars
★★★★
MATADOR
It’s an idea as old as Johnny B. Goode: rock’n’roll kids hitting the road like they’re off to join the circus. Except in The Catastrophe (Good Luck With That, Man) – a mini-epic peak in this audacious, explosive rock opera by the US indie combo Car Seat Headrest – the band is an actual bunch of “clown troubadours” (per the libretto) touring a dead-end land. “Kids who don’t know why they bleed… They are bones dry bones in American towns,” singer-songwriter Will Toledo declares in a frenzied wail, summing up the itinerary.
In fact, The Catastrophe is a hectic T. Rex thump that blows up like Document-era R.E.M. on Quadrophenia steroids with lyric asides to Gen Z woes (dead cellphones), 1950s doo wop (The Edsels’ ’58 hit Rama Lama Ding Dong) and real cities on old Car Seat tours like Maple Valley, Washington. “Run out in any direction/One more time to reach perfection,” Toledo promises in the breakneck chorus. The van may be full of clowns, but it’s a hell of a trip.
That’s just one, winding chapter in this ornate account of dreams and crises set at a college Chaucer might have passed on the way to Canterbury with dramatis personae (Chanticleer, Behemoth, Rosa’s Lizard Brain) that suggest David Lynch hijacking The Tempest. Toledo was the ultimate indie loner on his first, pseudonymous Bandcamp releases in 2010. Still, he told MOJO in 2020, “I grew up on the album as the bible of music… I think in long term.” Executed with his longtime line-up – guitarist Ethan Ives, drummer Andrew Katz and bassist Seth Dalby – The Scholars is that aspiration unleashed and unhinged, a feast of classic-rock dynamics in relentless whirlwind suites.
For a guy who used to be so lo-fi he made records in the front seat of his parents’ car, Toledo has a solid grip on arena-rock scale and thrill-ride momentum. “A series of simple patterns slowly build themselves into another song,” he sings at one point in Gethsemane, a 10-minute parable about the high cost of playing God that comes in tectonic shifts of Neu!-like electronics, Who-ish drums and power chords, and hopeful vocal prescription (“You can love again if you try again”). Planet Desperation is 19 minutes of serial hysteria and hallucination: Toledo belting from inside deep reverb; hot gallop and fuzz guitar; a stillness of piano and schoolboy-Queen harmonies. “I’m running out of places to bury your body again,” Toledo cracks like Bob Dylan doing Raymond Chandler. “Every song is a crime scene.”
There are shorter kicks and tender mercies on The Scholars: the yearning pop in Devereaux; the British folk-ballad delicacy of Lady Gay Approximately. But it’s the jubilant reach and dynamite in the details that makes The Scholars a rock opera worthy of the form. As Toledo puts it in Reality, another tale from the road, “Hold on to this thread/And don’t look back.”
The Scholars is out May 2 on Matador.
ORDER: Amazon | Rough Trade | HMV
Tracklisting:
CCF (I’m Gonna Stay With You)
Devereaux
Lady Gay Approximately
The Catastrophe (Good Luck With That, Man)
Equals
Gethsemane
Reality
Planet Desperation
True/False Lover
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Photo: Carlos Cruz