Greater than most bands that started within the backseat of the household automotive, Automobile Seat Headrest appears well-suited for a high-concept rock opera. From the band’s earliest days, when the challenge was simply Will Toledo recording alone in Virginia, songs had been by no means simply so simple as singer and topic—his debut Twin Fantasy was a romantic epic sheepishly masquerading as a ramshackle emo report. His 2020 report Making a Door Much less Open was primarily a treatise on fame itself, and culminated in Toledo adopting the persona “Trait,” a gas-masked, bunny-eared protagonist beforehand launched in a Automobile Seat Headrest facet challenge referred to as 1 Trait Hazard. When Automobile Seat Headrest started teasing their new report, The Students, through an alternate actuality game-style web site, it felt like an appropriately elaborate rollout for a band who’s not often taken actuality at face worth.
And but, Toledo was hesitant to dive head-on into the full-scale world-building of a rock opera. To listen to him inform it, he appeared afraid that he may stumble into one of many style’s many pitfalls. “You pull one thing off of The Wall—it’s not essentially going to be banging by itself. It wants that context,” he instructed the podcast How Lengthy Gone. “I like when you may pull a track out and have that particular person piece.” It’s a brutal evaluation of Pink Floyd, although it comes from a deep respect (the unique model of Twin Fantasy’s “Excessive to Loss of life” interpolated “Jugband Blues,” in spite of everything).
On The Students, each track goals to be an “One other Brick within the Wall Pt. 2”—9 self-contained epics that, Toledo hopes, will sum to a larger entire. However overburdened by a complicated plot, with no room for a listener to digest the bevvy of settings and characters he’s simply launched, The Students is mired in and muddied by the madcap impulses of its creator, drowning out what would in any other case be among the band’s most impressed, experimental compositions to this point. The Students is a rock opera for the playlist period; it needs to include each a richly textured narrative—with all of the character growth, inside motivations, and rising and falling motion required therein—and in addition 9 songs that may stand alone, plucked out of context and jutted up in opposition to no matter different songs occur to land on Spotify’s autoplay.
So, the plot: The Students takes us to the imaginary Parnassus College, the place we meet a forged of scholars who’re all on parallel searches for that means: our narrator, the Chanticleer; Beolco, a playwright who’s paranoid his finest concepts are behind him: “A thousand concepts piled up within the tomb,” he says on “CCF (I’m Gonna Keep With You)”; Devereaux, the “son of a backwaters spiritual conservative” who hopes to search out increased that means on the libertine lawns of the American college (“Devereaux”); and Rosa, a medical pupil who can revive the useless (“Gethsemane”). There’s additionally, after all, a area people based mostly on dressing in furs and feathers (“Woman Homosexual Roughly”), which I’ll let the Redditors decipher.
