Twin Fantasy - By Car Seat Headrest

ALBUM TITLE: Twin Fantasy (2018)

ARTIST: Car Seat Headrest

GENRE: Lo-fi / Indie rock

LISTEN HERE: Bandcamp​

I knew there was a reason why I felt such a connection with the original Twin Fantasy (2011), and Twin Fantasy: Face to Face (2018) explains that.

I would be doubtful of the merit of remaking an entire album if any of my favorite artists other than Car Seat Headrest (Will Toledo) had undertaken it. But with the release of Teens Of Style (a very well received re-recorded compilation) in 2015, and Teens of Denial (one of the most highly lauded albums of the year) in 2017, he has more than proven his capability as a songwriter that can take on anything. In a Reddit AMA a year ago, in response to someone asking him where he saw himself as a songwriter at the moment, Toledo responded that he's "not much of one," that he's "just sort of tilling the ground." But I'd have to disagree with him – he may not creating absolutely brand-new content, but he's still creating in extremely worthwhile ways. The evolution of Twin Fantasy is a perfect example of someone being unable to flesh out their vision with a “rough cut,” but being able to execute it so much more effectively with practice and experience. I think the goal of any artist is to get your art as close to how you envision it as possible, and Toledo has gotten much closer to his ideal with Face to Face.

When listening to the new album, I found it to be more similar to the original than I thought it would’ve been. I guess I had an underlying worry that he would completely revamp the album, spoiling the original’s personal meaning to me and the place it holds in my life. This worry was shot upon actually hearing the album, but really, while Face to Face does keep all of the original meaning intact, it differs just enough from the first Twin Fantasy to captivate you again. On the whole, it just feels much more complete. I’m all for the purity of lo-fi musicians bashing out song ideas in their basement, but the sonic clarity of Face to Face provides a better vessel for Toledo’s subtly ingenious lyrics. His voice is stronger, but just as authentic. Just as raw, but no longer in an aesthetically rough way. Twin Fantasy has now reached its balance point.

The review to follow is not just a review of Face to Face, but also a comparison between the two versions of the album (the original is now subtitled Mirror to Mirror). I’m breaking it down song-by-song because that’s what I believe the album deserves. Some might find it slightly long-winded. But an album hasn’t meant this much to me in a really long time, so if there’s someone reading this who feels the same way, I hope they find something revelatory/comforting/personally striking within my musings.

Listen along to the album HERE as you read about each track below.

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1. My Boy (Twin Fantasy)

Both iterations of this song (the new and the old) function perfectly as openers. In the same vein as the later “Stop Smoking," the same (generally positive) refrain is repeated over and over again, but as we hear these repetitions we have time to ascribe our own meanings to these seemingly simple lines. And in this song specifically, the way Toledo sings each part with an increase in energy halfway through the song gives different meanings to the lyrics as well.

“It’ll take some time, but somewhere down the line, we won’t be alone.”

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2. Beach Life-In-Death

This was the first single of Face to Face, and I have to say, it highlights the extent of the new album’s supreme reconstruction.

I know that others probably had different experiences with the original Twin Fantasy, but for me, “Beach Life-In-Death” was not exactly the most “iconic” song off the album. For me, it felt slightly too long and rambling. But boy, I did not know what I was missing out on. The new version not only polishes the original track, but also brings out its latent, immense poignancy. And the culmination of small changes, in speed or chords, and additions of little vocal inflections and harmonies contribute to this transformation more than you’d think.

Now I can see that this song is a true epic. I’m not going to try to analyze every nuance of this very personal song, but here are some snippets of lyrics I found especially meaningful:

“It’s been a year since we first met/I don’t know if we’re boyfriends yet”

(I didn’t even notice this line in the original, but the contrast in how he sings this compared to other lines in the new version makes it so much more softly heartbreaking.)

“And it was my favorite scene…I couldn’t tell you what it means…But it meant something to me.”

“…take him home to your mother and/say ma, ‘this is my brother.’”

(The way he scream-sings brother is perfect.)

“Get more groceries, get eaten/By the one you love”

(Upon actually examining this line, I realized that he’s talking about – hopefully metaphorically – being eaten by the person you love, but I originally heard it like the groceries are getting eaten by the one you love, like an unexpected moment of intimacy.)

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3. Stop Smoking (We Love You)

This song stayed pretty much exactly the same, which is exactly how it needed to be. It’s still the only song on the album with just an acoustic guitar. The song obviously represents a specific circumstance in Toledo’s life: perhaps a playfully loving relationship. It’s not really about quitting smoking, but rather symbolizes how he feels for someone at his core – it sounds stupid to put into words, but I think everyone has this innate feeling that for the people you care about most, you above all else just don’t want them to die (or less dramatically, that you don’t want them to leave you in any capacity).

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4. Sober to Death

This song was my first introduction to Car Seat Headrest. I listened to it a couple years before I got around to listening to Twin Fantasy as a whole. It’s about being together and experiencing together, helping each other even when you’re not actively trying to at all.

When I was listening to the full re-release for the first time, I smiled so much while this song played. Upon replays, though, I think that was just because I was reminded of how much I loved the original. To be honest, the new version doesn’t really add anything; it just cleans the song up a bit -- but that’s all I would’ve wanted from a re-release anyway.

“Good stories are bad lives”

“You can text me when punching mattresses gets old”

“Every conversation just ends with you screaming/not even words, just (ahh-ah-ah-ah-ahhh)“

(This is my favorite part of the song. It’s a great example of what Toledo does best with singing and vocal harmonies. It stands out especially on the original, though, because it’s even more emotionally charged as its equivalent part in the new song.)

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5. Nervous Young Inhumans

If someone had told me that "Nervous Young Inhumans," my favorite track off the original album, was going to be the most stylistically changed before I had listened to it, I would’ve been mad. But its new execution is absolutely perfect. The song, made more electronic, is elevated to a tight, pop-like perfection without it becoming saccharine at all.

Upon re-listening to the original, I found the old track boring: Toledo's monotone talk-singing kind of adds nothing to the song. And I’m ultimately glad he replaced the galvanism bit. It was cute and cool and quirky in the original, but it solidified the song as a mere part of a concept album. The new album’s version focuses more on the (very clever, very heartfelt) concept of “being inhuman,” which rounds out the song’s meaning well.

I really do love the outro of the original, the way he describes why he implements his own iteration of galvanism in the song. There’s authenticity in tangentiality, in being able to lose the façade of a singing voice and hear how someone would speak to actual people in their life. But the new outro serves the same purpose as the “galvanism speech,” except that it’s more grounded in reality and reflects how real meandering thoughts and self-doubts would sound.

“Most of the time that I use the word ‘you’/Well, you know that I’m mostly singing about you”

note: the new music video for this song is the cutest thing, please watch it

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6. Bodys

Damn, this is a really catchy song. And I think it’s the most aesthetically-improved song of the new album. There’s significance in just how subtly Toledo is able to achieve this – without closely comparing the two, the version seems quite similar to the original. Almost none of the lyrics were changed, but the sharpened climaxing of the Face to Face version, accomplished with a gradual layering of guitar riffs which have more focused distortion, on top of a perfect bass drum beat, make the song even more danceable.

And undergoing catharsis through dancing is what “Bodys” is all about.

Bodies are so grounded to the earth, so fragile and easily affected. In "Bodys," Toledo feels nervousness and excitement overwhelming his body, and he takes it out through dance. And it's an appropriate thing: words belong to your brain, but dancing belongs to your body, and sometimes physicality is the only way you can get out how you're feeling:

“As long as we move our bodies around a lot/We’ll forget that we forgot how to talk/When we dance.”

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7. Cute Thing

To me, the new version delivers almost exactly as much as the original, a real CSH classic, did.

It is somewhat improved, though, again through just a few tiny alterations. Frank Ocean and James Brown, replacing Dan Bejar and John Entwistle, update the song to include Toledo's current music obsessions and are perhaps a bit more relevant. We get the addition of a pretty bangin’ guitar solo before the bridge, and I noticed immediately that he changed “I accidentally spoke your first name aloud, trying to make it fit in the lyrics of ‘Ana Ng’” to “I accidentally spoke his first name aloud,” which I love.

“I got so fucking romantic, I apologize”

“I am love…I will sleep naked…next to you naked”

(This outro ends the song just as strong and is just as raw as it began.)

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8. High to Death

"High to Death" is the most melancholy song of the album, and Face to Face definitely enhances this quality. And although it is a shift in emotional color, it still fits into the album well and is quite necessary.

I guess I don’t really have a lot to say about this song. It makes me feel a lot of things.

“Keep smoking, I love you…I still love you…but I don’t wanna die”

(This inverse of the refrain from “Stop Smoking (We Love You)” really hits home for me. I see it as representing the process of accepting things about the other person in a relationship that you know can’t be good, because it’s impossible for you to stop loving them. But at the same time, you’re subconsciously aware that these things are hurting you.)

“When’d you say you were leaving? When’d you really leave?”

note: check out Hojin Stella Jung’s (the speaker in the outro) “The Lady,” it’s super cool

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9. Famous Prophets (Minds/Stars)

I absolutely overlooked this song on the first album. I didn’t listen to it enough and thought of it as kind of a disjointed mess, the weakest point of the album.

I was definitely wrong. "Famous Prophets (Minds)" contains very real, sometimes tragic lyrics that are melancholy but not overdone. And with the new version, "Famous Prophets (Stars)" becomes the most important song of the album.

A great contributor to this effect is that the song underwent the biggest lyrical overhaul for the new album. Its lyrics on Mirror to Mirror were already strong, but Toledo somehow improved their poignancy and made them more reflective. Toledo sings in the background of a verse: “in the morning, when you wake up, are you mine?...Christmas tree’s dead, you know how time flies, are you gone?”

In the same way he does with "Beach Life-In-Death", Toledo builds the song with ebbs and flows, with so much more ease than the lo-fi original. Despite its length clocking in at over 16 minutes, it doesn’t feel like a bunch of short songs squished onto one track, but rather like one cohesive (yet still multifaceted) entity.

At about the 10-minute mark, the song almost imperceptibly slips into a sort of bridge. All of the instrumentation except for a single piano drops out. The lyrics now tenderly take the forefront. Toledo croons, “And when the mirror breaks, I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” speaking to the virtues of perspicacity and self-development, themes of which the collective revisions of the new album embody.

From after this point, the song grows in sound steadily until it reaches a massive height, a great swell of instruments peppered with his voice, lines from “My Boy (Twin Fantasy)” lightly distorted into staccato beats. The words, “It’ll take some time/But somewhere down the line/We won’t be,” jaggedly burst forth. The omission of the word “alone” at the end there perhaps signifies the end of a relationship: there no longer exists this hope that they both won’t end up alone.

Toledo must have known when he released the original Twin Fantasy that the ideas contained within it were not yet complete, that an evolution would be necessary. As he quotes from Corinthians in the new song, “For now we only see a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face.” The “now” he speaks of is the mental state he was in when he released Twin Fantasy in 2011, when he was in the middle of experiencing the emotional content of the album. “Then” represents the present day, the re-release of Twin Fantasy after Toledo has had the time to linger on and more fully process what he was writing about, and he is only now “face to face” with these issues. He closes off the song with “Now I know in part, then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. And now these two [the two albums] remain.”

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10. Twin Fantasy (Those Boys)

Here we are faced with the last song of the album. It’s not that this song is “better” than any of the other songs; as you can probably tell by now, I think this whole record is incredible. But this is the song I always, always come back to. Something I feel with the great majority of Will Toledo’s music, but with this song especially, is that I can listen to it when I’m over the moon with happiness, or in a really bad place, or (more commonly) when I’m somewhere weird in the middle. No matter what state I'm in or where I'm at, it still resonates with me. It resonates in a way that’s closer to my feelings than most other artists are able to capture.

The essential aesthetic qualities from the original “Twin Fantasy (Those Boys)” remain in the remake. But if you look closely at the lyrics that have been changed, you can tell that the tone of the song has shifted slightly – it ends the album on a resoundingly powerful note. On the spoken section, instead of explaining “This is the part of the song where Will gives up. He dissociates himself from his own romance until it becomes just a fantasy…He has only lyrics now,” as Toledo does previously, the encapsulation of this romance into lyrics becomes something positive and accepting:

“This is the end of the song, and it is just a song. It’s a version of you and me that can exist outside of everything else, and if it is just a fantasy, then anything can happen from here…These are only lyrics now.”

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#indierock #lofi