Car Seat Headrest's performance at NYC's the Bitter End was described in the invitation as "stripped down." That pledge would be broken within the first few seconds of new song "CCF (I'm Gonna Stay with You)," as the four-piece jumped feet-first into a dense full-band swirl that caused the bar's emergency-blue lights to flare and contract like dazed pupils.
But all things are relative; the performance could be considered bare-bones only against the grandiose enormity of The Scholars, Car Seat Headrest's first record in five years. The band — Will Toledo, Ethan Ives, Andrew Katz and Seth Dalby — tore through the album from top to bottom, leaving behind the record's buzzsaw synths, horns, conga drums and choral stacks in favour of an overflowing platter of meat-and-potatoes rock (some of which, like the epic "Planet Desperation" or galloping centrepiece "Gethsemane," stretch beyond the 10-minute mark).
Toledo — prep-school garb complicated by a curtain of lank hair — introduced each song with a bit of background, sometimes a literal explanation of its narrative and sometimes a musing on some grander, half-wrangled idea, with a point still on the horizon. His voice, elastic as ever, erupted through his white N95 mask, a piece of uncomfortable vintage, and careened about the heads of a largely bare-faced audience.
"Having close friends really afflicted by COVID, being afflicted by COVID myself, and having the medical wing really fail us and the government really fail us — and continue to do so — that shook a lot of my faith," Toledo tells me the next day, still masked, sitting on the floor of a Beggars Group office. The rest of the band are perched on couches around him, half-eaten sandwiches in clamshell containers and discarded hoodies littering the carpet.
Toledo has been transparent online about living with long COVID, and while the age of the flagellating "pandemic album" has largely passed, the ivy-clad world of The Scholars was deeply informed by a still-ongoing period of what Toledo describes as a "scholarship of faith" brought on by his illness.
"[I no longer felt like], 'Oh, I'm just a secular person, I have this academic interest in religion. For the most part, I believe in science. I believe in voting blue. I believe in the stuff that my parents kind of unquestioningly believed in as well,'" Toledo continues. "I'm kind of seeing a bigger picture, and a lot of it is not about faith at all. It's about doubt, and it's about these structures that I held as sacrosanct and unquestioningly followed — I'm starting to doubt them a lot more, and trying to figure out what life looks like without those particular walls."
Walls crop up all over The Scholars — a labyrinth of queerness, supernatural powers, clown schools, prayer, missing skulls and troubled troubadours — both literal and figurative, as characters attempt to scale the face of a new identity, the hurdle of familial tensions and social insecurities. The walls of Toledo's fictional Parnassus University are a temporary incubator, a place of becoming; it's what happens on the other side that has real consequences.
"I'm a cerebral person, and I like the format of school. It became a comforting format to me, just having that regular, year-in, year-out schedule from elementary school to college. And I think that, after college, I felt aimless and lost for a while, not having that regular schedule," Toledo explains. "I think that became sort of a basic point of this record: what do you do once the walls are gone? I think there's a duality to it, where the walls are comforting and they're also limiting. You might not want to be in them anymore, but then there's also that fear in losing them and not having that structure to your life anymore. When you're a student, you kind of have that advantage and that pride over the world, where you're one of the special, you're not just a commoner anymore. You're aspiring to higher education! But what are the actual experiences that you really learned from in life? It's the moments where life is its most painful and you're on the floor and you're humiliated."
Toledo describes his youth in Leesburg, VA, as being coloured by an "ambient intake of spirituality," his parents active participants in their small Presbyterian Church. His father's collection of Christmas and spiritual music, which shared themes with the American folk and country music that Toledo was surrounded by in the South, meant that faith and music were indistinct from one another.
The Scholars dissolves that indistinct membrane further than Toledo's music has in the past, folding the human humiliations — of illness, of being caught in a lie, of coming out and coming to terms, of going on alone — with the skyward pursuit of whatever lies beyond. Even sprawled on the cold hard floor, you might just feel the glow of paradise on your cheek.
"'Faith' was never a term I liked, because I think we kind of have a notion of maybe an on-off switch — you either believe something or you don't. And part of my journey in the past five years has been understanding how it's actually used in these deeper traditions where it's more like a muscle," Toledo says. "If you're on cruise control and let culture decide for you, then you end up with your faith placed in certain institutions, like in secular culture: the scientific wing and industry and capitalism."
He continues, "I think what faith means in this context is letting go of those walls, letting go of those structures, and no longer believing that if I get sick with anything, I can just go to the hospital and it can get fixed. It's about allowing myself to believe that life can continue beyond that framework. It's definitely not so much blind faith or unthinking faith, so much as being willing to sink into the darkness and not operate with walls on any given day."
The characters that populate Toledo's fantastical campus are all jumping the fence of their past selves and entering a strange new faith: Malory returns home on Christmas Eve newly colourful and flamboyant, and must confront the version of himself that still lives in his mother's head; Rosa rediscovers long-lost powers of healing and finds pain in the exchange; Beolco believes himself a reincarnated playwright, misunderstood by a world that doesn't see his brilliance; Deveraux escapes the backwaters to a world of newfound sexuality, but he still finds himself reaching through time for some grandfatherly guidance.
"I think that I'm on the same sort of journey that they are," Toledo says. "[It's like that] Greek vase that Joseph Campbell was analyzing in one of his books — he's seeing all these different characters go around in a circle on this vase. And even though they're different characters, he sees them as the same character going through that journey. And so it's a journey of learning, and then it's also a journey of life into life and death and rebirth."
"You've got to make peace with the dirt around you," Toledo sings on the scalding Ives duet "Planet Desperation," a strong tagline for the record and Toledo's approach to life with long COVID. The old institutions don't serve us anymore, and maybe they never did — the goal now is to sift through the soil for whatever roots are worth grabbing.
There are few obvious resolutions to be found in The Scholars' twisted fables, and Toledo is uninterested in tying his characters down with strict narrative cohesion. A scholarship of faith is less about finding answers than it is asking questions.
"I'm definitely in the middle of things. That's the thing about an album, is that you do have to finish it," Toledo says. "But I guess that's where art separates from life — art has a finishing point, a punctuation mark on it, and [if you try that with life], then you're building up that wall again, and it's always going to be artificial to an extent. I do think that my walls are a little bit wider now than they were. That's all I can ask for."