We continue Amnesty Week, and continue the “covering your own song” theme..
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[6.22]
Alex Clifton: Richard Dyer once wrote about listening to music and authorship, noting “you can hear the homosexual feeling [conveyed] by putting together what you know of the circumstances of queerdom of the time with those sounds.” That’s not to say that you can tell someone’s sexuality just through how music sounds, but all through this year, I’ve tried to figure out how the opening riff to “Nervous Young Inhumans” denotes a certain kind of queer desire. It builds and builds, yearning for some kind of positive resolution, like when you have a crush on someone who you know can’t reciprocate it. Maybe I’m reading too much into this as a queer person who has fallen in love with her double in the past, but that’s the whole point of Twin Fantasy (Face to Face). The entire album is a project in queer doubling, including the fact that it was literally re-recorded and re-imagined from Will Toledo’s original low-fi 2011 vision. Lyrics such as “you never raised your hand” carry double meanings — you never hit me, but you also never volunteered for anything. The music is furious and longing and so full of feelings that I’ve longed to find conveyed outside my own brainspace, translated into sound. Twin Fantasy is an intriguing look into artistry and the making and re-making of music. Perhaps seven years down the line, Toledo will re-record the project in an entirely new context — it wouldn’t surprise me. In the meantime, I’ll keep revelling in the riffs and the reworkings and the feelings. I’ve certainly not seen anything else like it all year.
[10]
Joshua Minsoo Kim: The noisy guitar riffs are fun, but I vastly prefer the unpolished sound of the original version. There, the whirring “doo-doo doo-doo” vocal bits and cheap clang of hi-hats carried an adolescent energy. I was also more willing to sit through the unnecessary musings of a teenage Will Toledo during its outro. Not sure why he decided to include a tedious monologue here.
[3]
Tim de Reuse: Synth lines like The Killers but less stadium-ready, vocal harmonies like Green Day but sleepier, and a mix that’s clean but, like, not too clean. The real question: how on earth does an entire verse about childhood penmanship survive getting airlifted from 2011 bedroom lo-fi into 2018 high-energy power pop? The answer, unfortunately: without its original charm entirely intact.
[5]
Ian Mathers: Given how metatextual (with his own and others’) Will Toledo’s work can be it’s a relief that I enjoyed it right away, without needing to know any of the background of this song and its re-recorded parent album that I found when looking up the lyrics. Not that all that context weakens it, just that the visceral, whirling rush of “Nervous Young Inhumans” doesn’t need any special pleading to be thrilling. The converted and unconverted alike will have a field day with “art gets what it wants and it gets what it deserves,” because he’s interested in continuing the conversation his work is part of; he’s generous like that.
[7]
Alfred Soto: The instrumental interplay is suggestive enough to tell Will Toledo’s ‘You may find yourself/In a shotgun shack’ schtick goodbye and good luck, although fans might reckon this remake/remodel of a 2011 track needs the deepening. Some of us are whores for guitars and wobbly synths.
[6]
Iain Mew: It’s like a transatlantic greatest hits sampler of mid-’00s indie rock packed into one song, which since I listened to so much of that makes it easy to get on with and less easy to love. I do enjoy the way that they collapse the distance between the muscular glam end of things and the wiry post-punk end, and the first verse and its hyper-specific handwriting images are promising. However, they don’t bring them into anything, and I kept waiting for any other lyrical or musical moment to bring things together, and instead just got a drawn out muttering coda.
[5]
Taylor Alatorre: Every time I try to listen to Car Seat Headrest, I just get immensely sad that Sioux Falls never blew up.
[4]
Juan F. Carruyo: Will Toledo became an underground internet sensation because he recorded a near-masterpiece in a most primitive set-up in his bedroom (but also his car when it came time to do the vocals). As most lo-fi lifers eventually do, from Robert Pollard to Lou Barlow, he turned pro when his record label gave him enough money to realize his vision and locked himself up in a studio with his band. With the new sheen and polish, he sounds like the bedroom Springsteen he always hinted at, coming up with anthemic choruses and very literary verses. Yet the song structure betrays his melodic gift and the it takes a nose-dive from minute 2 onwards. It doesn’t entirely kill the mood, it just makes him sound prog. And that’s a good thing.
[8]
Claire Biddles: Turns out I made a mistake with Car Seat Headrest: last year I listened to two or three songs from the original version of Twin Fantasy and concluded that their condensed, one-note indie rock was not for me. What a wonderful thing this rerecorded “Nervous Young Inhumans” is in contrast: stretched wide and anthemic, the wind propelling it forward almost audible. The squeaking synth line imitates a swell of strings; love built from nothing at all. The climactic confession is (superficially at least) buried in self-doubt, or perhaps deftly constructed to seem that way: “Most of the time that I use the word “you”/Well you know that I’m mostly singing about you.” Mostly. If your admissions of devotion only come at 3am when the other person is asleep at the end of the phone line, you’ll get it.
[8]