Fifteen years after the first LP under the name Car Seat Headrest, lead singer/songwriter Will Toledo comes through with “The Scholars”, a 70-minute rock opera that works fine as a narrative piece, and truly shines as a benchmark for how far the band has come over the years. 

If you’re a listener untainted by the Seattle indie-rock bands’ particular brand of angst, this newest album may take a little time to find its footing. The lyrics are complex and difficult to figure, and the narrative contained within the words is told with little attention to traditional story structure. 

But, on the flipside, this complexity also means the album gives the listener a lot to chew on. And in a time where many new releases are quickly washed away in the ocean of easily digestible (but easily forgotten) earworms, “The Scholars” stands as something that demands, but eventually rewards, the audience’s attention.

Over the years Car Seat Headrest has made some big swings, artistically and technically. The biggest (up until now) being when they signed to Matador records in 2015, bringing along a permanent lineup of three new musicians, and a new layer of audio fidelity that gave room for Toledo’s writing to reach a more mainstream audience. 

Up until that pivotal signing, the music under the Car Seat Headrest name was totally DIY, and flaunted that homemade quality as a stylistic technique. Guitars were noisy and filtered, the drums were always sharp or somewhat flat in their recording quality, and Toledo’s voice cracked through words that walked this line between the hyper-modernity of his college years and the classical artistic influences that got him there. 

In the first chunk of Toledo’s career there’s actually a pretty constant stream of references present throughout, and a lot of the fun to be had from the listener is within the mishmash between the modern and the classical. A track like “The Gun Song” for example features lines about getting stoned, and changing numbers, all couched within a thematically appropriate reference to Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”.

In their early music there’s no separation between the worlds of Iphones and Ipods and the writings (be they musical or otherwise) of David Bowie or James Joyce. This dichotomy has remained one of the few consistent threads throughout the bands’ sonic journey. Now though with “The Scholars”, the band has enough time and resources to take a swing at playing their own riffs on some of these references in place of merely alluding to them.

It’s clear from the opening notes of “CCF (I’m Gonna Stay With You)” that the band has never sounded more “polished”. The introductory hi-hat pattern is recorded and mixed with a level of fidelity totally absent from the band’s early recordings. It’s not just the technicality of the production that brings this sheen though, Toledo’s vocals for example are stronger than ever. 

Big upwards vocal swings have always been a staple of Toledo’s compositions, and this newest album is the first time they’re always recorded without even a hint of breaking down within his voice. On “The Catastrophe (Good Luck With That, Man)”, he breaks out into these little bursts of screamed emphasis at fairly regular intervals. 

These emotional blasts work as an effective way for the singing to inform the particular breed of chaos implicit within the narrative, while never being so scratchy or jarring as to detach the listener from the underlying musical motifs. Like the anthemic hollerings of Pink Floyd or The Who (both of whom have rock-operas to match), the sheer power of the vocals is what draws each element into a cohesive whole.  

The final piece of this whole though are the lyrics, as powerful as the music can be, the words that they underline get a little too lost in their own grandiosity to fully reach the emotional peaks implied by the pumping guitars. In order to get the full narrative experience from the record one must read along via a physical libretto within the vinyl’s liner notes (or a digitized copy of it). 

This libretto contains – in addition to the lyrics – an introductory paragraph before each song which sets the tone for what that particular track is going to discuss. It works as a loose guide into the album, it doesn’t provide every answer to each potential moment of confusion, but it does make it a lot easier to follow the proceedings. 

The album deals with two rivaling schools and the inhabitants therewithin: The astute atrium of academia known as Parnassus University (founded long ago by a mysterious playwright), and the neighboring Clown College (no detail supplied). These schools house anthropomorphized animal students whose trials and tribulations are transcribed with all of the catchy songwriting you would expect from such a veteran group. 

Within the first act of the album (in case one wasn’t aware, the album is trifurcated) titled “The Companions” works as a sort of extended, five-track introductory sequence to our cast of characters. We meet Beolco, Devereaux, Malory, a group of jester musicians in a band called CCF (the most “important” of whom is Chanticleer), and Rosa, a group of ragtag students drawn together either narratively or thematically by their overarching struggles. 

Devereaux and Malory both sing (on “Devereaux” and “Lady Gay Approximately” respectively) of their fear of disappointing familial expectations, those fears being furthered by their families seemingly strong connection with God. Beolco and Rosa share fascinations with the people of the past. And the jester band are all, well, together, in a band. 

Each character gets their moment in the spotlight in this first act, but the lyrics of each of these introductory tracks spend so much time in over-written metaphor that their stories themselves (without help of the Libretto) are borderline unfollowable. Meaning that when it transitions into the second act, “The Ransom” and the story begins kicking off in full, the confusions of the first act become all the more glaring. 

The second act includes ghosts, betrayals, a poisoning, an invasion of Parnassus University by the neighboring Clown College, and oodles of characters we still haven’t met. In fact, the aforementioned Rosa isn’t even introduced until the second act with the track, “Gethsemane”, a song that would be great if it felt tied further into the narrative. 

This track (via a tale of spirits and their adjoining spirituality haunting the living) teases the ideas of God as some sort of a sociological presence in addition to a religious one that gets some new context with Deveraux and Malory’s stories. But what happens after this? The album spends more time in lengthy progressive rock tracks like “Reality” and “Planet Desperation” to little emotional avail. 

These songs give rise to Toledo’s bandmates as Ethan Ives and Andrew Katz are able to shed their instruments (guitar and drums, respectively) in lieu of extended vocal passages. But the emotion present throughout their voices is the only real thing keeping the listener seated. It’s cool to hear these new voices, but when the words they’re singing feel so unrelated to anything we’ve heard thus far it’s a bit difficult to get on board as a listener. 

This all combines (the good and the muddled) to create a record that’s doubtlessly organized, but doubtfully enjoyed as one wonders whether they’re missing something. The libretto’s opening describes it as translated from long ago, claiming that the words exist in a form fragmented from the whole it once helped to make up. Immediately they let you know that this is going to be structurally sparse, but it doesn’t make up for how dissonant it can feel at the moment. 

Someone listening who’s familiar with the band’s prior works (especially those farther removed from this newest release) will doubtlessly enjoy “The Scholars” if for nothing else than shock. Shock that they’ve made something so “well” produced, shock at all the new vocal presences, and shock that they’ve done all this without all their normal techniques. Who knows where the band will go from here? I certainly don’t. 

A listener starting here may get a false idea of the sound that built the Car Seat Headrest name, but from here on out who knows what other sounds they’ll be trying. Their musical pilgrimage seems to be one driven by constant self-innovation, so whether or not each individual aspect of the mission spreads the good word, in the rearview I’m sure the whole of their deeds will be fascinating.