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Tonight: Car Seat Headrest

Seattle indie rock outfit Car Seat Headrest will stop by Asbury Hall tonight amid their Twin Fantasy 2019 tour with fellow Seattle rockers Naked Giants. The show comes to Buffalo on the back of 2018’s Twin Fantasy, a harrowing, dynamic album with a long and remarkable history of its own. Car Seat Headrest began in Leesburg, Virginia in 2010 as the bedroom solo project of a teenage Will Toledo, a major player in the modern, internet-based DIY scene. Toledo self-produced and self-released his first eight albums, using minimal equipment to record experimental, unrefined indie rock that would quickly gain an online cult following. The cult exploded with 2011’s Twin Fantasy – now titled Twin Fantasy (Mirror to Mirror) –, an ambitious and heartfelt concept album about a tumultuous first love, recorded with a laptop microphone, released for free on Bandcamp, and adored by thousands. Car Seat Headrest’s booming presence on[...]

Car Seat Headrest – “Nervous Young Inhumans”

The latest offering from Car Seat Headrest’s reputable catalog is more pop-oriented than most anything Will Toledo and the band have put out in past years. Whereas a good amount of their surrounding output has a foundational punk edge or overarching touch of influence from whimsical indie rock precursors like The Kinks, “Nervous Young Inhumans” has a dancefloor-ready sheen. Nonetheless, the essence of Car Seat Headrest–the thought-provoking lyrics, the energy–is still perfectly intact. The song will appear on the group’s upcoming album Twin Fantasy (Face to Face), a re-recording of their similarly titled 2011 album. The record is the follow-up to Car Seat Headrest’s critically acclaimed 2016 release Teens of Denial.

5 Best Artist Discoveries of 2016

As part of our year-end wrap up, we decided to make a list of our top five (non-local/regional) artists that we were pumped to find in 2016. Car Seat Headrest  Looking back on 2016 from an indie music fan perspective, this year will be seen as the year that Car Seat Headrest first broke. The Seattle-based now-quartet/project headed by Will Toledo, had a huge year, breaking last winter with hype from major online tastemakers such as Pitchfork and All Songs Considered. The band’s introspective full-length Teens of Denial (Matador Records) offered a glimpse of Toledo’s wallflower nature and deeply reflective lyrics, coupled with raw guitars and minimal synths to make a perfectly packaged indie rock masterpiece. Jessy Lanza  Hamilton, Ontario-based songwriter, Jessy Lanza, made a blip on our radar with last spring’s sophomore break-out album, Oh No. Co-produced by Junior Boys’ Jeremy Greenspan, the retro-pop sound is a mix between French[...]

Five Most Anticipated Acts of Pitchfork Festival: Friday

Last year was my first ever Pitchfork Festival experience, and let me tell you, it’s something I’ll never forget.  The bands, the food, the city, and just the overall vibe of the festival, all come together to make one of my favorite music festivals – period.  The Chicago-based music festival boasts phenomenal lineups year after year, and 2016’s lineup is no different. As part of buffaBLOG’s coverage leading up to the festival this weekend, I will be highlighting my five most anticipated acts of each day of the festival.  You can check out last years photos here, here, and here. Julia Holter @ Green Stage (4:35pm)  Julia Holter’s 2015 album, Have You In My Wilderness, was almost immediately met with critical acclaim.  Her transition away from her more experimental ambient work and into a more art / baroque pop style was met with open arms.  I can’t wait to see how[...]

Car Seat Headrest – Teens of Denial

Recording under the moniker Car Seat Headrest, Will Toledo has self-released eight albums between 2010 and 2015. He finally made his major label debut last year with Teens of Style, a collection of reimagined tracks from his previous albums, now performed with fuller arrangements. This year, he has a new batch of songs with an even more expansive sound for his second album on Matador Records, and tenth overall. Titled Teens of Denial, it is an epic foray into full-tilt indie rock. Toledo is pumping life back into guitar-driven indie, infusing it with the prog influences of the ‘70s and the catchy tunefulness of the ‘60s. He makes use of overlaid spoken word, screamed backing vocals, ornamental synths and horns, and layers upon layers of heavily distorted guitars. There are no tight 3-minute rockers here, as each song is carefully composed and the arrangements are fully fleshed out. The record has an effervescent ebb and flow to it, twisting seamlessly[...]

The Bandcamp Era

Car Seat Headrest recently rolled out a “Greatest Hits” of sorts. Well, the bandcamp lo-fi version of what a greatest hits compilation would be. The album is called Teens of Style and it raises at least a couple of interesting questions: What do we do with all this lo-fi music laying around Bandcamp that previously independent artists released, now that those artists are being signed? What does this mean on a greater scale, for artists and fans, as windows like Bandcamp are becoming a standard within certain genres? There have been a lot of irrelevant questions posed to these guys from different angles, mostly pertaining to the “pressures” of having a wider audience, having to work with other people, and all kinds of ridiculous questions that really stereotype people like Will Toledo (Car Seat Headrest) and Mat Cothran (Elvis Depressedly) as introverted guys who wouldn’t know how to make or perform[...]