If you’re thinking about diving into The Scholars, the new album from Car Seat Headrest, don’t mess around. Go past the three-minute songs, and the four-minute one and the eight-minute one, and the 10- and 11-minute ones, too. Go straight to the main event, the 18-minute “Planet Desperation.” Will Toledo goes on an epic search for his “gnostic soul,” seeking his way through Bowie-esque music-hall wallow, New Wave kicks, Queen-ly chorale, arena-rock ecstasy, flower-headed folk, heart-spilling piano beauty, Dead-ish space-drum vertigo, and much more, taking so many peripatetic zigs and zags this might go down as the first indie-rock tune that could come with a no-spoilers warning.
A moment like “Planet Desperation” might be mind-blowing, but it shouldn’t really be surprising. Toledo has always been happy with a challenge. When Car Seat Headrest blew up in the mid-2010s, he made his name as a Who-meets-Pavement garage-rock savant, swamping the internet with releases that culminated with Car Seat’s boffo 2016 double-LP Teens of Denial. He could’ve easily settled into a career satisfying his fans with two or three anthemic records a year. Instead, he nurtured a more contrarian impulse — creating an alter-ego named Trait and wearing an LED mask onstage, swerving away from guitar-rock with the Beckian, beat-driven 2020 album Making a Door Less Open, putting out a bunch of genuinely funny comedy records as part of the side project 1 Trait Danger that sort of suggest the Lonely Island by way of Ween. The Scholars is the band’s most over-the-top gesture yet (and their most collaborative. co-written with guitarist Ethan Ives), an at times thrilling, occasionally confounding, rock opera. It’s also their most collaborative, with guitarist Ethan Ives stepping up as a co-writer and vocalist.
He serves it up with the tongue-in-cheek claim that The Scholars is “translated and adapted from an unfinished and unpublished poem written by my great-great-great-great-grandfather, the Archbishop Guillermo Guadalupe del Toledo,” and he’s taken this project seriously enough to give his opera a libretto, outlining a drama that’s like a campus coming-of-age novel packed inside a whimsical riff on Shakespeare and Chaucer. In his notes, each song gets an explicating paragraph and the lyrics are rendered as dialog between characters — there’s Devereaux, who “struggles with his sexuality and sets off to seek his own fortunes at the nearby Clown College”; Malory, “who joins the ‘birds of paradise,’ a community based on beautification through feather-and-fur modification, extensive costumery, prosthetics, and the like”; the “‘Chanticleer,’ a mysterious figure who, in the original text, seems to be responsible for conveying the whole tale to the audience,” etc.
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Connections between the literary work and the actual song lyrics may only exist in the teeming brain of Toledo. But the good news for the common listener is that as albums with librettos go, this one is surprisingly easy to bang your way through — sort of like a Guided by Voices LP expanded to The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway scale. In a welcome twist. the short songs are just as dramatic and action-packed as the long ones. With its slamming drums and crisp Cars riff, “Devereaux” is an A-plus display of Toledo’s preternatural gift for complicating catharsis and embattled heroism. “The Catastrophe (Good Luck With That, Man)” blows by with a clipped, manic, Devo-like tunefulness as Toledo sings about driving “through the desert of irony” searching for answers. “Equals” is stomping metal pomp complete with a Devil appearance straight out of Doctor Faustus that still manages to be singalong fun. With a title taken from a grim old American folk song, the acoustic-guitar-goth hallucination “Lady Gay Approximately” has the white-knuckled hard-strumming drive of a Mountain Goats tune. Along the way, he piles up references to Madonna, Bowie, and “Who Put the Bomp,” as well as literary, Biblical, and classical allusions.
Fitting an album that takes so many big swings, it’d be almost kind of disappointing if The Scholars didn’t sometimes feel like a bit too much. After “Gethsemane,” a prog/dance-rock tour de force packed with tormented religious imagery that feels half as long as its 10 minutes, the 11-minute Seventies AOR-style ballad “Reality,” penned and sung by Ives, is like a trip across the River Styx with nothing to listen to but Styx. But such athletic excess is part of what makes this album admirable, as is a sense of spiritual and intellectual hunger that’ll be quickly recognizable to anyone familiar with the Ziggy Stardust/Zen Arcade/Tommy school of self-searching rock epic. Sometimes that comes through in the lyrics: “Pull me out of the fire, tell me you love me, and throw me back in/If I could ask for mercy, if I could give up this life of sin,” a character implores early on. And it comes through in the same openhearted intensity that’s been fueling Car Seat Headrest since their humble days of two-minute Bandcamp bangers. The next stage for this band could literally be anything, and it’ll be worth waiting for.
