Faces From the Masquerade

by Car Seat Headrest

Overview

Part of the charm of Car Seat Headrest's early albums, along with the fine, emotionally incisive songwriting of leader Will Toledo, was the unfussy, sometimes sloppy sound of the homemade production and arrangements. When Toledo chose to bear his soul, which happened frequently, the warts-and-all approach was a superb match for his stories of discovery and uncertainty among America's youth. Car Seat Headrest's work was good enough that in time, Toledo and his collaborators attracted a larger and more loyal audience than he ever imagined, and that unwittingly adjusted some people's expectations of their work. On 2020's Making a Door Less Open, Toledo opted for a harder and cleaner sound informed by electronic music, and when he booked live shows to support the release, he assembled a band that approached his songs with a new level of professionalism, though Toledo's vocals and lyrical persona seemed little changed. 2023's Faces from the Masquerade is a live album drawn from a three-night run the band played at New York's Brooklyn Steel in March 2022, and this documents a band that has learned how to work a crowd and deliver solid entertainment for a paying audience. On these recordings, Car Seat Headrest rock harder than they ever have in the studio, with a tighter and more emphatic attack, and the fans in the audience (who get plenty of space in the mix) are clearly delighted with this show. When one of Toledo's bandmates revs up the crowd with a shout-out to "the crazy motherf**kers" in the audience, it briefly feels like Car Seat Headrest is attempting to deliver post-millennium indie rock's answer to Kiss Alive!, and it points to the odd duality of this album. Faces from the Masquerade is the work of a band that sounds fully engaged and can rock with sweaty authority, which makes for great entertainment. It also gives the music a very different tone than it had in the original recordings, and while determining which is better is largely a matter of taste, this is a bit like the shift from Guided by Voices' early four-track recordings on Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes to their embrace of hi-fi production on Do the Collapse and Isolation Drills, only Car Seat Headrest's transformation has a far greater impact on the emotions at the heart of the songs. Faces from the Masquerade is an impassioned snapshot of a great band firing on all cylinders in front of an adoring crowd, and that's a fine thing. This just isn't how one might have expected Car Seat Headrest to sound, and that's what might polarize some fans who have been around since 2011's Twin Fantasy. ~ Mark Deming

Product Details

Release Date:	12/08/2023
Label:	Matador
UPC:	0191401202817

Tracks

Disc 1

1. Crows
2. Weightlifters
3. Fill in the Blank
4. Hymn
5. Hollywood
6. Bodys
7. Something Soon

Disc 2

8. 1937 State Park
9. Sober to Death
10. Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales
11. It's My Child (I'll Do What I Like)
12. Can't Cool Me Down
13. Beach Life-In-Death
14. Deadlines

Album Credits

Performance Credits

Car Seat Headrest   Primary Artist
Jordyn Blakely   Tambourine
Andrew Katz   Drums,Vocals
Will Toledo   Guitar,Vocals
Ethan Ives   Guitar,Vocals,Vocals (Background)
Seth Dalby   Bass
Bartees Strange   Guitar
Ben Roth   Keyboards

Technical Credits

Mike Zimmerman   Design
Scott Sedillo   Mastering
John McRae   Mixing,Engineer,Producer
Andrew Katz   Composer
Will Toledo   Composer
Ethan Ives   Composer
Emilio Herce   Photography