Car Seat Headrest- Making A Door Less Open

 
What a wasted opportunity. There’s so point dwelling on it- Toledo was trying to add more electronics to Car Seat Headrest sound in order to shake things out I guess and completely failed on every front. What makes Making A Door Less Open even more frustrating is seeing all the potential buried under the electronic hideousness. The opening track would be pretty solid if not for the constant drone that seriously gave me a headache during the first listen. Can’t Cool Me Down would be amazing with a richer instrumentation. It doesn’t sound bad, just very empty, you really want there to be more of a payoff to the track. Deadlines (Hostile) makes you let your guard down by sounding actually decent but right after that Will hits us with two borderline unlistenable tracks- Hollywood and Hymn (Remix). Hymn is especially baffling, it’s just a bunch of noises with no rhyme or reason to them, I have no idea what was the thought process behind this song. After those two Martin is a real oasis, it's a solid indie rock piece by itself but in the context of the album it’s stunning. On the B-Side the record gets way more tolerable, it sounds like Will was figuring out how to incorporate those electronic elements into his music as the record went along. Another component that made Toledos music so captivating in the past is his lyricism which was also very lacking on Making the Door Less Open. I don’t care for him bitching about Hollywood and as much as I enjoy Martin the lyrics on that song doesn’t amount to much either. For that reason There Must Be More Than Blood is slowly becoming my favorite, it’s the first song on the album where I was truly captivated by what Will was saying.

I don’t enjoy criticizing this record. Kids of Denial was my #1 album of 2016, and Car Seat Headrest is one of my favorite artists in recent years. Hopefully Making A Door Less Open was just a failed experiment and not a new standard for Will Toledo projects. Too many ideas on here are equally baffling and down right ugly as the front cover.

Rating: 5/10

            

                        

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