Car Seat Headrest make sense of the Trait era.
The longer it goes, the harder it gets to cast your mind back to the early days of the pandemic.
As an art form, music overnight for many was revitalised, a means of both escapism and connection to an outside now seen only through a windowpane.
The fact that all of the stuff reaching us then had been recorded years before was an odd thing to get your head around, and what some were looking for was succour, a place to be in a period of stress and dislocation. This meant that timing was everything.
Will Toledo’s prior decision to re-boot Car Seat Headrest on his early 2020 release Making A Door Less Open from indie experimentalists to experimental experimentalists – complete with introducing himself as an avatar called Trait – was then suddenly caught up in a new lens; we wanted familiarity, and what we got was frankly a pain in the ass to try and relate to.
It seemed even Toledo himself wasn’t sure about what came to be known as MADLO, as he re-recorded separate different versions of the track Deadlines for each of the album’s respective formats.
But he stuck with it, playing live in costume as Trait if not in character until in 2022, despite the mask, he got sick and developed a highly debilitating variant of long COVID which took the band off the road.
Not, thankfully, that during their absence anyone gave up on them if streaming numbers were anything to go by, and having made two of the previous decade’s most critically picked over records in 2015’s Teens Of Style and the following year’s Teens Of Denial, it could be argued a stylistic reset was a luxury that could be afforded.
Now, with the singer well again, the group is in the process of finally following up MADLO, commemorating a run of three nights at the 2,000 capacity Brooklyn Steel venue played before illness. The timing of Faces From The Masquerade feels appropriate as a point on the cusp between separate eras.
The shows featured Trait costumes – gradually shed as things wore on – and a requests section culled from thousands of online votes. And rather than an ‘entertain me’ audience, the audience are loud, enthusiastic and in full voice, whilst the mix is pleasingly rough enough to hear the edges.
Compiled smartly, each set opened with the glacial, Cure-esque Crow (which had never been played live before) whilst at the opposite end of the set Deadlines is reworked yet again, the stated – and achieved – purpose being, ‘to turn it into the climactic dance monster it always wanted to be’.
With a catalogue that leans toward the highly immersive, the post-punk stomp of Fill In The Blank and Hollywood’s wheezy psychedelia feel like outliers when laid against the epically rendered Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales and It’s My Child (I’ll Do What I Like), whilst the plaintive Sober To Death was a request poll topper and it was revealed served consciously as a firebreak for audiences that were starting to jump their guardrails.
The centrepiece though is the ecstatically received thirteen-minutes-plus of Beach Life-In-Death, a triptych which is in part an orthodox rock song and touches thematically on navigating sexuality, self-doubt and just beating mental and physical exhaustion to get to the next thing.
In short, what many of us felt like more than three years ago. And even if our comfort zone reduced to size of a pinhead, Will Toledo kept his alter ego on life support until Faces From The Masquerade could make the world realise it was what it needed after all.
