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.
's work was good enough that in time,
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
,
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
'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,
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
's bandmates revs up the crowd with a shout-out to "the crazy motherf**kers" in the audience, it briefly feels like
is attempting to deliver post-millennium indie rock's answer to
Kiss Alive!
, and it points to the odd duality of this album.
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
Isolation Drills
, only
's transformation has a far greater impact on the emotions at the heart of the songs.
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
to sound, and that's what might polarize some fans who have been around since 2011's
Twin Fantasy
. ~ Mark Deming