In spite of (or possibly because of) its adventurous, chorus-less form, each second is used economically. The book-ending passages are driven by uptempo, chugging guitars with the first verse the Face to Face version featuring a newer, funk-inspired arrangement. The 2011 Twin Fantasy is something of a personal favorite album of mine, and an album I’d gladly call a masterpiece the newer version-subtitled Face to Face-marks a further improvement on a perfectly imperfect album.Īs with Mirror to Mirror, a good litmus test for prospective fans of the album is first-half-centerpiece "Beach-Life-in-Death." Spanning three sections over 13 minutes, the chorus-less track jumps between styles and emotions, yelping one minute and whispering the next. everyone grew up with their fundamental schemas fucked" both appear on "Beach-Life-in-Death") and dance-party/ballad ("Bodys" and "High to Death.") Choruses rarely appear more than twice, and often there are subtle but meaningful lyrical changes between the two ("Sober to Death"'s two choruses are from different perspectives), even between songs (the lyrics of shortest track "Stop Smoking" appear entirely in negated form in "High to Death.") The obsession with duality and imagined versions of lovers-coupled with the deeply lo-fi production of the original-made Twin Fantasy a prime candidate for reworking on both a thematic and aesthetic level. IN-SANE" and "When they finally found a home at Walt Disney Studios.
It’s also about dualities: real/imagined, dead/alive, young/old, but also simultaneously about the dualities present in Toledo’s songwriting: emotional/literary ("I. Like Eno’s theory of the Platonic version of a song lying at the core of a recording, this is an album about how we’re only ever in love with an imaginary version of a person that we’ve created, as Toledo spells out for us in a monologue at the albums halfway point. It’s an album-propelled mostly by longer, through-composed pop songs-about how maybe we always create the person we’re in love with. Written and recorded entirely by Toledo at age 19, it’s filled with the nervous energy and self-loathing you’d expect from a teenager writing songs in his bedroom, but also features hyper-specific, literary lyrics that feed into the album's overall themes. The original Twin Fantasy, retroactively subtitled Mirror to Mirror, was a ten-track concept album about a (possibly Imaginary) romance between Car Seat Headrest’s then-sole member Will Toledo and a (possibly dead) older man. The answer, of course, has to depend on the original source material. If the material failure is stripped away-as Car Seat Headrest have done in re-recording, re-arranging and re-writing Twin Fantasy-are we pulled closer or further from the songs? Eno demystified the appeal of these failures: " the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to them." Deep down, there’s some ideal, Platonic version of these songs, and, paradoxically, drawing our attention to the medium through which we’re experiencing them brings us closer to glimpsing at these ideal versions.
Eno suggested that throughout art there are intentional material failures: from the crack in James Brown’s voice to the tape hiss of lo-fi classics Hi, How Are You? and Bee Thousand, it’s the sound of objects failing. When announcing the re-recorded version of Car Seat Headrest’s 2011 lo-fi album Twin Fantasy, Matador Records appealed to Brian Eno's "sound of failure" concept. Car Seat Headrest's updated version of their 2011 lo-fi cult classic album is a dense and more emotional take on the original.