★★★★★
Will Toledo is the voice of a generation that doesn’t want a voice.
He’s the spokesperson for an aimless cause, an over-caffeinated Bob Dylan who has spent three hours on Wikipedia reading about the environmental destruction he knows he can’t halt. His music is angry, but its focus is not the inhumanity of war. Rather, it rails against the millions of insignificant evils that make up everyday life – that ever-so-casual strand of cruelty.
Teens Of Denial, a sort-of-but-not-really follow-up to his major label debut Teens Of Style, is a sort-of-but-not-really concept album about a young man named Joe who sort-of-but-not-really suffers from a nervous breakdown.
It’s also both the largest-scale and most intimate album Toledo has yet recorded. Though songs like ‘Vincent’ and ‘The Ballad Of The Costa Concordia’ are almost as grandiose (and as long) as ‘Boxing Day’, the 15-minute masterpiece that kicked off his album Nervous Young Man, they’re more precise than that track, more pained.
Teens Of Denial feels like the kind of album you have listened to your whole life even if you’ve only heard it once. You might not yet know Will Toledo, but Will Toledo knows you.
Car Seat Headrest’sTeens Of Denialis out now through Matador.
