Making a Door Less Open, Car Seat Headrest’s 12th album, split critics and longtime fans but grabbed me by the collar during our unnerving spring. It's the band's first release after triumphant nights at the Garden and Hollywood Bowl last year--amazing stuff when you consider Will Toledo was releasing records from his bedroom on Bandcamp just a few years ago. His buzzy and beat-driven electronic textures—with spectral nods to Bowie and Trent Reznor—felt thrilling and wholly unique in 2020.
“Weightlifters” hums and skitters, as Toledo sings about music blasting, the sound of machines, a place where all his prayers are answered and his secret visions sprawl. “Can’t Cool Me Down” came to him when he was sick with fever, resulting in spare bass lines and synthesizers underpinning lyrics about an unquenchable spiritual thirst. His talky bridge is straight Talking Heads, strange and groovy.
“Deadlines (Hostile)” pounds out a simple back beat while Toledo gathers frenetic vocal steam like Isaac Brock on the skids: Am I on your mind / is it what you like? / covered under your sleeve sometime. “Deadlines (Thoughtful)” gets weirder, like a NIN space march, with knobs twiddling an undercurrent of dread, as his so-called old compassion bubbles up and transforms him into something unrecognizable.
The record peaks near the end with “Life Worth Missing” and “There Must Be More Than Blood”; they search for big rock statements in a year with few of them. After grabbing his lover’s hand, Toledo suddenly sees new moves on “Life Worth Missing”: I feel it break, I feel the weight / of anger, pain and sorrow / breaking out of me. It is a revelatory step forward, accelerated by another meta leap on “There Must Be More Than Blood.” He ponders life and death and seems ever-so-close to finding answers, however ineffable.
that holds us together
there must be more than wind
that takes us away
there must be more than tears
when they pull back the curtain.
He closes with one of 2020's best lyrical passages, as he contemplates life stretching out before him, reaching a paradoxically sobering and hopeful epiphany.
My hand dropped to the aisle
I could see myself clearly
For the first time in awhile
There was nothing but lines
Nothing but outlines
My gut sank like a stone
But I heard another voice say
"We all walk alone”
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