MUSIC: Special treat in store for Car Seat Headrest fans

CAR Seat Headrest fans, new and old alike, will be delighted to learn that Will Toledo’s 2011’s Bandcamp masterpiece, ‘Twin Fantasy’, has been re-recorded and re-imagined and will come out on February 16 on Matador Records.

 With a seven-piece band in tow (including members of Naked Giants), Car Seat Headrest will be playing it live when they arrive at Dublin’s Olympia Theatre on Wednesday, May 16.

Toledo always knew he would return to Twin Fantasy.

“It was never a finished work,” he says, “and it wasn’t until last year that I figured out how to finish it.”

It took eight months of mixing just to get the drums right but now he has finally produced the album he always wanted to make.

It sounds the way he always wanted it to sound.

But this is no shallow second take, sanitized in studio and scrubbed of feeling. This is the album he always wanted to make. It sounds the way he always wanted it to sound. He never did complete the work. Not really. Never could square his grand ambitions against his mechanical limitations. Listen to his first attempt, recorded at nineteen on a cheap laptop, and you’ll hear what Brian Eno fondly calls “the sound of failure” – thrilling, extraordinary, and singularly compelling failure. Will’s first love, rendered in the vivid teenage viscera of stolen gin, bruised shins, and weird sex, was an event too momentous for the medium assigned to record it.

Even so, even awkward and amateurish, Twin Fantasy is deeply, truly adored. This is Will’s greatest strength as a songwriter: he spins his own story, but he’s always telling yours, too.

Between nods to local details – Harper’s Ferry, The Yellow Wallpaper, the Monopoly board collecting dust in his back seat – he leaves room for the fragile stuff of your own life, your own loves. From the very beginning, alone in his bedroom, in his last weeks of high school, he knew he was writing anthems. Someday, he hoped, you and I might sing these words back to him.

“It was never a finished work,” Toledo says, “and it wasn’t until last year that I figured out how to finish it.” He has, now, the benefit of a bigger budget, a full band in fine form, and endless time to tinker. According to him, it took eight months of mixing just to get the drums right. But this is no shallow second take, sanitized in studio and scrubbed of feeling. This is the album he always wanted to make. It sounds the way he always wanted it to sound.

You can catch them live at the Olympia Theatre on Wednesday, May 16.