Album Review: Car Seat Headrest - Twin Fantasy

Indie rock wunderkind Will Toledo was still in the tail-end of his teens when he first released his bedroom masterpiece Twin Fantasy on Bandcamp under his Car Seat Headrest moniker back in 2011, and his first move following the breakthrough of his smash 2016 opus Teens Of Denial is to revisit Twin Fantasy again but this time armed with newfound studio mastery and a full band at his disposal.

A song cycle about the confusion of adolescence and the sexual awakening concurrent with one's first fully-fledged relationship, the raw power and emotion of the original lo-fi document remains intact but is now delivered in a far more realised fashion favouring pristinely clean (but not cloying) production, presumably far more in line with Toledo's original vision. Close listens betray a painstaking attention to detail with banks of layered guitars adding huge heft and intricate minutiae nestling amid the arrangements, while repetition is used to great effect and Toledo's sleepy, laconic vocals reek of world-weariness despite his relative youth.

It's not a rote copy of the original - some cultural references have been updated in Cute Thing and Car Seat Headrest's Australian tour of last year is referenced in Nervous Young Inhumans - but it still unveils more like a rich mosaic than your typical record, with tracks veering from sub-two-minute bangers (Stop Smoking (We Love You)) to quarter-hour opuses (Famous Prophets (stars)) while recurring motifs flit between songs to thrilling effect.

Like all of Toledo's best work highbrow, almost existential sentiments abound - like he's trying to get to the bottom of life's conundrums through the medium of rock'n'roll, a noble endeavour indeed - but this massive labour of love about lost love ultimately raises as many questions as it answers: fortunately the pay off lies in the journey rather than the destination.