1) Sunburned Shirts; 2) The Drum; 3) Something Soon; 4) Times to Die; 5) No Passion; 6) Psst, Teenagers, Take Off Your Clo; 7) Strangers; 8) Maud Gone; 9) Los Borrachos (I Don't Have Any Hope Left, But the Weather Is Nice); 10) Bad Role Models, Old Idols Exhumed (Psst, Teenagers, Put Your Clothes Back O); 11) Oh! Starving
Toledo and gang wave goodbye to the self-release days with a selection of re-recordings, and have a whole lot of rockin' fun doing it.
Key tracks: "Something Soon", "Times to Die", "Strangers"
Teens of Style is the first proper Car Seat Headrest album, if we're being a bit glib about it. And we can be, comfortably. Part of Will Toledo's mythology is the knowledge that he started out with troves of haphazardly recorded EPs and albums thrown out into the world via Bandcamp, but it'll take a special type of obsessive at this point to backtrack through all those scruffy home recordings to find the good things worth more than a curious glance. I think Toledo's great and all, but I'm not that kind of obsessive, and while there are definitely reasons to look into some of those BC-era releases it gets a bit close to finding golden needles hiding in haystacks.
Teens of Style was aimed for us lazy people. It's the first Car Seat Headrest record for an actual label, recorded in an actual studio, but it's intended to be a sort-of-not-really beginner's guide to Car Seat Headrest: a set of re-recordings of select songs from the Bandcamp days. It's not a best of - note how the tracklist contains nothing off either the canon darling Twin Fantasy or the actual best BC-era release How to Leave Town. Rather, it's a selection of Toledo's favourites which work well together and which could easily be given a longer lease in life through this kind of canonisation. It's intended to establish early Car Seat Headrest in a nutshell but with the benefit of accrued experience in tow, and the songs have been given a more consistent sound quality along the way - even if the production is intentionally still kept a little raw as a tribute to those old demos, including Toledo's voice being nearly unintelligible underneath all the vocal fuzz. It's the big boy version of Toledo making noise on his own, and thus an appropriate bridge between the two stages of Car Seat Headrest - closing off an era and starting the next by shifting songs from one to the other.
In doing so, Toledo has effectively released the ultimate version of all his teenage disillusionment and the need to escape from it. He outright states "I want to romanticise my headfuck" on "Something Soon", before shortly breaking down into another loud section of messy guitars and raw vocals. It's snapshots of breaking down in the bedroom and then celebrating surviving through it with every living fibre of your body, and it's made to sound like a hell of a lot of fun. The more far-reaching scopes of Toledo's songwriting are held back and rather than drawn-out dramatic epics, Style is a tighter set of shorter firecracker cuts, kept scrappy, snappy and loose. Feel-good foot-tapping rhythms, loud and distorted guitars and Toledo belting out his voice in full half the time come together to an album that's part punky teenage defiance, part party songs for slacker youths. It's playful too, with little interludes that throw a channel-hopping curve, the depression in the lyrics is laced with cheeky black humour and wink-and-nudge self-awareness, and the suddenly switching dynamics and little production twists (like the skip-start vocals halfway through "Times to Die") keep things a little positively unpredictable. Sure there's a lot of soul-searching and navel-gazing within the album, but it sounds wild and free and like it's having a blast, and that's the spirit of Teens of Style. It doesn't wallow in its problems, it rocks them out.
Despite the self-restrained confinements of Teens of Style - the lo-fi glamouring sound, the more direct material - it still packs a good amount of variety within it, extending its indie grooves into different branches effectively. The loud rock and roll of "Sunburned Shirts" and "The Drum" and the urgent escapist powerhouse "Something Soon" are the sound of a full band intent to get the crowd jumping, the chopped up indie disco hit "Times to Die" and the drum machine -driven mellow melancholy of "No Passion" are closer to Toledo on his own playing with his music software. "Los Borrachos" flicks wildly between slapdash synth pop exercises and the band joining in on a sudden burst of volume throughout, in one of the album's quirkier moments. "Maud Gone" is a lament; the part of the album where the album's recurrent subtexts finally reach the surface.With a simple organ riff and Toledo's wailing it becomes the big centrepoint ballad, the one respectful but solemn gaze onto the floor - it's both the right thing in the right place in terms of sequence but genuinely a gorgeous song, a minimalist late night ballad with an earnestness the rest of the album actively shies away from. "Oh! Starving" is the exact opposite, closing the album with an ostensibly silly farewell that could double up as a musical number, though it then transforms itself to match the rest of the album's aesthetics right before its final bow.
But "Strangers" needs to be singled out specifically. It's unassuming at first but it's a curveball, though even in its initial form it's impressive enough. Its melodic runs, the air-punching choruses full of boastful defiance and the subsequent instrumental bridges where the lackadaisical playing from the rest of the album is suddenly gone and replaced with a smoothly operating and incredibly tight unit - it all screams like it could be a genre classic, and nods at the more finely arranged material that would come later down the line. And then after the second chorus it goes for the jugular. Toledo uttering "When I was a kid I fell in love with Michael Stipe / I took lyrics out of context and thought he must be speaking to me" in one of the few lucid moments of the album where he's completely and perfectly audible, backed by an atypically brightly singing guitar melody, is such a moment on its own already, but Toledo uses it as a springboard. From there "Strangers" rises into a finale of wordless hollers, desperately pleading final verses and grand instrumental stands. It becomes the anthem it promised to be, and if the rest of the album slightly obscures Toledo's talent as a songwriter by its intentional aesthetic choices, this is where it's clearly pointed out.
"Strangers" is the one big lofty-ambitioned classic of Teens of Style; the rest of the album doesn't even try to aim towards that direction. In the greater scheme of things the album is little more than an amuse bouche before the brand new material kicks in, a quickly recorded nod to the old fans done with the new ones in mind and a way to tease the actual First Big Budget Car Seat Album to come. And it's lovable in all that intentional scrappiness of it. Teens of Style wasn't meant to be anything with a greater meaning, but the songs are great, it's got gusto and charisma and the overall lackadaisy vibe is exhilarating. The word that keeps coming to my head over and over again is fun: it's an honest-to-god bouncy rock album from a source where you perhaps didn't expect one, but who deliver it excellently. If you consider this to be the "official" start of Toledo's discography, its destiny was always to be the kind of humble debut that is bound to be overshadowed by the albums the come; but the kind of record you'll shout about being underrated because it's just too charming to be buried beneath the other albums.
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