25-year-old millennial indie rocker Will Toledo is perhaps best known and loved for the half dozen or so self-released Bandcamp albums he wrote and recorded as a teenager, particularly Twin Fantasy. Now he has re-recorded it. Released in multiple formats including cassette, compact disc and digital download the original Twin Fantasy album has inspired an impassioned cult following in the years following its release in 2011. Calling himself Car Seat Headrest (a reference to early vocal takes recorded in the soundproof back seat of his car), Toledo recorded the entire original album on a laptop computer playing all of the instruments himself having no backing band at the time (he had left his previous band Nervous Young Men the prior year). Toledo has since been signed to the prestigious Matador Records label and added Ethan Ives (guitar) Andrew Katz (drums) and Seth Dalby (bass) to the band’s current lineup. No stranger to revisionism, this reimagining of Toledo’s 7-year-old low-fi indie opus to teenage heartache and angst marks the third such occasion he has revisited older material. In 2013 Toledo re-worked a slew of songs from his old band for the two hour long Nervous Young Man album. His Matador debut and 2015 follow up Teens Of Style served as a kind of introductory compilation of newly recorded versions of Toledo’s older songs written in his teens and originally released between 2010 and 2012.
In order to differentiate between the two latest Twin Fantasy releases, Matador has rebranded the original 2011 album Twin Fantasy (Mirror To Mirror) while dubbing the newly recorded 2018 version Twin Fantasy (Face To Face). Whether the update of Toledo’s 2011 DIY indie classic resonates and connects with fans the same way the original did remains to be seen. According to Toledo he never properly completed Twin Fantasy in the first place, “It was never a finished work and it wasn’t until last year that I figured out how to finish it.” Fans of the original will be pleased to know that there are plans for the first ever vinyl pressing of the original 2011 Twin Fantasy album just in time for Record Store Day. Either way, the future looks bright for the talented young Toledo who no doubt has a wellspring of “millennial life at 25” material waiting to be written now that he has afforded himself the opportunity of reconciling the legacy left him by his former teen self. Perhaps that is precisely why he chose to close out the final strains of Twin Fantasy’s second last piece with 1st Corinthians 13:11-12 “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. At the end of my childhood I put these ways behind me. For now we see only reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” Absolute biblical.
Rating: 8/10
Star Rating: 3.5/5
2018 Album Reviews: 6/52