Twin Fantasy (Face to Face) is the eleventh studio album by indie rock band Car Seat Headrest, released on February 16, 2018. It is a complete re-recording and reworking of the band's sixth studio album, Twin Fantasy, released in 2011.
Video Twin Fantasy (Face to Face)
Background
On December 13, 2017, the band released a re-recorded version of "Beach Life-In-Death", the second track on Twin Fantasy on Spotify. This sparked fan rumours that the album would be re-recorded and released the following year. On December 27, 2017, an Amazon listing detailing a re-recorded version of Twin Fantasy was found by fans, and subsequently uploaded to the Car Seat Headrest subreddit. This was followed up by a listing on SRCVinyl.com with the date February 16, 2018, which had an abridged version of the following press announcement from Matador Records, written by Peyton Thomas.
Will Toledo always knew he would return to Twin Fantasy. He never did complete the work. Not really. Never could square his grand ambitions against his mechanical limitations. Listen to his first attempt, recorded at nineteen on a cheap laptop, and you'll hear what Brian Eno fondly calls "the sound of failure" - thrilling, extraordinary, and singularly compelling failure. Will's first love, rendered in the vivid teenage viscera of stolen gin, bruised shins, and weird sex, was an event too momentous for the medium assigned to record it.
Even so, even awkward and amateurish, Twin Fantasy is deeply, truly adored. Legions of reverent listeners carve rituals out of it: sobbing over Famous Prophets, making out to Cute Thing, dancing their asses off as Bodys climbs higher, higher. The distortion hardly matters. You can hear him just fine. You can hear everything. And you can feel everything: his hope, his despair, his wild overjoy. He's trusting you - plural you, thousands of you - with the things he can't say out loud. I pretended I was drunk when I came out to my friends, he sings - and then, caught between truths, backtracks: I never came out to my friends. We were all on Skype, and I laughed and changed the subject.
You might be imagining an extended diary entry, an angsty transmission from a bygone LiveJournal set to power chords and cranked to eleven. You would be wrong. Twin Fantasy is not a monologue. Twin Fantasy is a conversation. You know, he sings, that I'm mostly singing about you. This is Will's greatest strength as a songwriter: he spins his own story, but he's always telling yours, too. Between nods to local details - Harper's Ferry, The Yellow Wallpaper, the Monopoly board collecting dust in his back seat - he leaves room for the fragile stuff of your own life, your own loves. From the very beginning, alone in his bedroom, in his last weeks of high school, he knew he was writing anthems. Someday, he hoped, you and I might sing these words back to him.
Early next year, Car Seat Headrest will release a new version of Twin Fantasy. "It was never a finished work," Will says, "and it wasn't until last year that I figured out how to finish it." He has, now, the benefit of a bigger budget, a full band in fine form, and endless time to tinker. According to him, it took eight months of mixing just to get the drums right. But this is no shallow second take, sanitized in studio and scrubbed of feeling. This is the album he always wanted to make. It sounds the way he always wanted it to sound.
It's been hard, stepping into the shoes of his teenage self, walking back to painful places. There are lyrics he wouldn't write again, an especially sad song he regards as an albatross. But even as he carries the weight of that younger, wounded Will, he moves forward. He grows. He revises, gently, the songs we love so much. In the album's final moments, in those apologies to future me's and you's, there is more forgiveness than fury.
This, Will says, is the most vital difference between the old and the new: he no longer sees his own story as a tragedy.
He's not alone no more.
On January 9, 2018, Matador Records formally announced the release of the re-recording, entitled Twin Fantasy (Face to Face), with the original recording being re-released as well. Twin Fantasy (Face to Face) will be released via Matador on February 16. The original, which has been re-titled Twin Fantasy (Mirror to Mirror), will be released as a part of Record Store Day on April 21. This re-recording's announcement coincided with a tour announcement and a music video for the track "Nervous Young Inhumans".
Maps Twin Fantasy (Face to Face)
Critical reception
Twin Fantasy (Face to Face) has received critical acclaim. On Metacritic, the album received a score of 87 out of 100 based on 18 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim."
Track listing
All tracks written by Will Toledo.
Personnel
Charts
References
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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