Car Seat Headrest--Teens of Denial

i was way more excited about the Hop Along record last year re: indie guitar records

ditto mitski re: indie guitar records

I really like this album, it's definitely one of the best indie guitar rock albums in a while (along with Mitski it's been a relatively good year for those). the track lengths are definitely pretty self-indulgent though (there's no reason the intro to Vincent had to be 2 minutes, Cosmic Hero really should be half its length, they jam out the end of songs just a little too long etc.), there's no reason it had to be 70 minutes long

a fair few of his old home-recorded albums are quite good too but this one feels like a real step up

but maybe i'll give this one more of a chance since i recall kornrulez liking some random stuff i also like. i.e. the glands. (not to mention korn, obvs.)

Yes! The Glands rule. Rest in peace Ross Shapiro.

(I only know 2 songs by korn. I picked this screen name because I wanted the most uncool name possible)

ha ha obvs

There are lots of good riffs and melodies interspersed, but the lyrics try too hard to be clever and the songs are so long that I've had trouble connecting with this record.

Everything I've heard from this has been really lumpy and midpaced and lacking in character.

Am I hearing the same record as you guys? I'm mildly confused.

I LOVE the band name but found his last record unbearably dull and uninspired. Gonna give this new record a go and report back.

friend of mine in medical school played bass on and toured for "teens of style" -- i really dug their big single, "something soon". will give this one a listen

this is definitely a big step up from Teens of Style, the songs really benefit from recording in a studio as a band and it's much more dynamic and better arranged

he'd really outgrown the home recording by Teens of Style, which tried to improve in sound quality over earlier albums but ended up in an ugly in-between

I LOVE the band name

really?

yeah, i think it's great. really bored by the record though

the music's pretty good, I just don't find his voice compelling at all

parquet courts are working in a similar sort of bland indie rock revivalism, but at least they've got some riffs and a handful of sick songs. better artwork and attitude, too. i don't find anything about this Car Seat Headrest record compelling at all.

responsible for the most banal and depressing "What's In My Bag" of all time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLGVGvO1YeE

Thread needs more car seat headrests, imo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZTa8Nh0VlE

xp Yeah I saw that What's in My Bag! Made me wait another two months to actually listen to the record. My girlfriend and I have a joke about everyone saying "I like Twin Peaks but I haven't finished it yet," also the thing about the Kurt Cobain record is so lame.

this kid's brilliant

drunk drivers/killer whales is the best one, i think. "killer whales" are a pretty potent metaphor for entrapment, sort of surprising, maybe a bit on the nose but this is indie rock

Will played with Jandek here in LA a couple months back. Was encouraged to check this out afterwards but am still pretty meh on the songs.

god, that What's In My Bag *is* super lame. if you like this band and/or his songs, don't watch it, it could ruin him for you.

I thought this was just a joke band based on this one "which black metal band's logo is this?" picture:

http://i.imgur.com/NBF4paF.png

i actually like the band name, it (combined with seeing, i think it was Whiney, roaring about it on twitter) definitely contributed to my intrigue. completely banal over-familiar object but you rarely every say "car seat headrest" so it somehow comes out sounding fresh(???)

based on Teens of Denial, they're not a great band yet but there's some promise imo. i love the power-pop punches in the chorus of 'fill in the blank' (you have no *right* to be depreeessed, you haven't tried hard enough to like it), and u gotta admit there is something about the timbre of his voice

I'm listening with malevolent intent

Dear god this is so shit and there's 67 minutes left

it's a fantastic band name, but the guy is a nubbin and his music blows. this thing made me want to open my veins: http://pitchfork.com/news/70175-car-seat-headrest-reviews-kanyes-repulsive-beautiful-life-of-pablo/

It’s also one of the best albums I’ve heard in a long time — and one of the most beautiful. It’s very strange. My younger self would never have tolerated an album this reprehensible, this unrepentantly egotistical, yet I’ve probably listened to it more times this year than anything, aside from David Bowie’s Blackstar. Why? Well, it’s just good.

fuck off

just good music

he's like 19 years old, right?

oh here's an eight minute song. we all needed this

age is just a number man

i just mean, i'm glad no one was putting 19 year old me's ilx posts on p4k

oh totally. i posted the most colossal amount of shit when i was nineteen (and thereafter) as you're all aware, but the fittingly hardline response has meant that my idiot quotient is nowadays limited mostly to irascible liveblogs of indie rock. in a similar way i hope car seat headrest guy reads my posts and maybe changes how he makes music, or even gives up entirely

'destroyed by hippie powers' is ok though i guess

oh god

he's 24

i hate this record. once in a while it's pretty decent power pop but the songs are endless

I'm on the same boat... no sound dynamics at all... some good moments but no fun at all to be had.

this............isn't bad

wtf

good band name, absolutely loathe what i've heard

the opening track was trite and melodically non-existent, the second track almost got a good groove going but faltered and forgot to go anywhere. since then there has generally been decent quality music. definitely turned from a hate-listen into something else, not sure what though

feels like this year's The Monitor (right down to an epic track equating emotional upheaval to a famous nautical event), and of comparable quality too

Cmon now this is not anywhere near the quality of The Monitor... but yeah I liked this well enough when I came across it earlier this year. Knocking round with 20-something North American blink-182 survivors recently sent me scrabbling around for potential common ground and this was pretty much the best we came up with. I liked the lyric about there being a Van Gogh picture on the wikipedia page for clinical depression because I checked it out and right enough, there is.
Could do to be ruthlessly trimmed down though. I like these sorts of albums 12 songs long (tick) but leave your cup in the sink and be out the back door within 32 minutes or so, this one still has it's feet up on my coffee table smoking all my cigarettes and ignoring my subtle hints to leave. 70mins... oh you had a shit time at college? Get tae fuck, I got grownup matters to attend to... like factchecking your shitty lyrics, yeah I know, I'm pathetic.
tbf The Monitor also suffered from this, yeah I don't think your breakup was QUITE on the scale of the American civil war OH IS THAT THE TIME? but I preferred their brand of overemoting for some reason. Maybe beard- and Springsteen- and alcohol-related reasons. Prolly just alcohol-related actually.

iirc he was a /mu/ poster so his early championing came from there and i imagine some of his popularity comes from the ONE OF US mentality

i should like this stuff in theory but i just never really understood what he was trying to accomplish. it's like an indie rock equivalent of someone translating a book from english to french and then 100 years later someone else translating it back into english.

iirc he was a /mu/ poster so his early championing came from there and i imagine some of his popularity comes from the ONE OF US mentality

.....oh

lol yeah that explains things way better than the cult backstory

I do like a couple songs on this tbh

the single version of "drunk drivers" released today is terrible. it loses all the charm and power of the album version.

half would be generous

I love AoL, but really don't see the need to run this guy down. He's put out a pretty good throwback indie rock album in 2016. Of all the people to criticize, he seems pretty low on the list. It's a catchy album, decent band, decent recordings, and Butterglory got an awful lot of press back in the day. (And I still like them ok as well). Just seems silly for this band, of all bands, to have a backlash at all.

Wait ... what does Butterglory have to do with this? I'm missing something.

can we run down people whose idea of rock is so narrow that this is the album that determines how good of a year it was for it

like with a car?

throw car seat headrests at them

i don't think this is necessarily "more of the same" indie nonsense, it's clearly got some sense of ambition, i just think that ambition actively detracts from the songcraft, which is merely ok

― who is extremely unqualified to review this pop album (BradNelson), Thursday, December 8, 2016 5:11 PM (one year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is doubly true of the twin fantasy remake that just came out

it's so so bloated! the original was long enough at an hour and then he added another 11 minutes onto it

Only on my first listen but I can't tell if this record is amazing or an overindulgent mess. There are great moments in it and I like its "this-record-will-save-your-teenage-self"'s level of ambition, but aahhhh I just wish he'd write a strong, simple hook - something that so many other bands can do with songs that aren't 12 minutes long. It's a good record and I understand it's appeal, but it's emotional weight doesn't always translate into greatness. Also that "I am a good person" monologue is cringeworthy as hell

someone should edit his stuff down and put it on Bandcamp like that one dude did with JT's 20/20 Experience

i...quite like this

whyyy

like, much more than TOD which imo wasn't very good

super into twin fantasy, "Body's" in particular.

Skimming thru this thread, I'm surprised at the reactions to "ToD"... I thought that album was absolutely terrific -- big, ambitious, funny, anthemic, audacious, self-effacing; great/quotable lyrics ("I felt like a walking piece of shit / In a stupid-looking jacket"; "The effects are so good these days / If there were gears behind those big brown eyes, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference"); hot production, super rockin', "1937 State Park" blasting at full volume; really "going for it," not afraid to be corny or "mainstream"; communicating "big ideas" through crowd-pleasing rock 'n roll in a way that very popular rock artists did in decades past but seems to have fallen out of favor recently (...I'm aware I may be setting myself up with that last one).

The fact that it sounds "like '90s indie rock" seemed incidental to how great it was -- though I admit that I love '90s indie rock, and that very well may have helped!

I also dug the "Twin Fantasy" redo, but have only listened to it a few times....

That chorus on '1937 State Park' pulls off the very rare vulnerable/anthemic and blows me away every time.

that's the one song i like off tod, i appreciate the inward digging his stuff aims for but that track besides it feels mostly like inward trudging

is there a new album

Another lyric I love:

I’ve been waiting all my life
I’ve been waiting for some real good porn
Something with meaning, something fulfilling
I’d like to make my shame count for something

I feel like there’s something (half-)ironic, or subtly tongue-in-cheek, about the pathos on this album — a gentle, straight-faced mocking of his own drama — which elevates the proceedings, and is part of why the lyrics are so great. I guess Lou Barlow presents a rough precedent for this kind of “dry self-awareness about the singer’s own melodrama.”

By contrast, the lyrics of Twin Fantasy are more straight-up emo (Will was actually a teen when he wrote them, no?) — but still very good!

(One thing to add is that I’m not usually much of a “lyrics guy” — but Will Headrest’s lyrics are so good, I find myself really aware of & focusing on them.)

there's an eye for detail that reminds me a lot of Courtney Barnett actually.
In the 'I did not transcend, I felt like a walking piece of shit in a stupid looking jacket' the jacket lyric so perfectly captures the feeling of alienation.

...and she’s my other current rock fave!!

The "new" one is a great record, IMO... it and the new Parquet Courts have been enough to scratch any "indie rock" itches this year.

while this is good, what you just wrote is hideously incurious and lazy

also fuck parquet courts

Yeah, but I don't give a fuck what you think.

you're such a dull cunt

Also, the new Arctic Monkeys album is one of their finest yet - it's been a decent year for this kind of stuff.

'this kind of stuff' - would you seriously call the CSH album the same 'kind of stuff' as the AM album ffs

No, but I'd call you a dull cunt.

GOAL TURRICAN (Turrican)

Turrican 1 - 1 imago

The Northerner responds just a minute later, in identical fashion - a scrappy equaliser, but they all c(o)unt!

Like, keep hinging your entire existence in presenting to the internet how esoteric you think your tastes are in order to draw attention to yourself in some sort of "please love and respect me" exercise and perhaps one day - you can only hope - some poor deluded fucker will ram their tongue straight up your shitpipe.

Buoyed by the goal, Turrican knocks it around confidently in midfield. The crowd have started to find their voice!

^ Imagospeak for "Look at me, internet people! Please tongue my shitpipe. Anybody!"

It's starting to get a bit repetitive and momentum has been lost. The crowd starts to drift out, unsatisfied

^ Your lasses glittering review of your bedroom technique.

omg just make out already

Those Boys

Anyway, while I can't help but wonder what happened in his life that he ended up like this in the first place, I wish LJ well in his quest to convince the entire internet to kiss his arse, I really do.

(Not holding my breath, though.)

I <3 a good Britfight