In August, Car Seat Headrest returned to Seattle’s KEXP to tape a live session, to-date their only in-studio performance around the release of new album The Scholars. Initially a one-time live stream, that session is today arriving on the internet more-or-less permanently via the station’s archive. Fresh from a summer of cathartic live dates, the band blast through four new songs – “Lady Gay Approximately,” “The Catastrophe (Good Luck With That, Man),” “Gethsemane,” and the 20-minute multi-movement epic, “Planet Desperation.”
Inspired by an apocryphal poem by “Archbishop Guillermo Guadalupe del Toledo,” and featuring character designs from Toledo’s friend, the cartoonist Cate Wurtz, the album focuses on the yearning and spiritual crisis of the titular Scholars. They range from the doubt-filled playwright Beolco to Devereaux, a person born to religious conservatives who finds themselves desperate for higher guidance. Meanwhile, the music draws, carefully, from classic rock story song cycles such as The Who’s Tommy and David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.
Self-produced by Toledo, the band have never sounded more fully realized or assured of themselves. And while Car Seat Headrest started as Toledo’s solo project, it is now fully a band. “It didn’t really feel to me like things got in sync in an inner feeling way until this record, with that internal communal energy,” he explains. “That’s been a big journey.”
Photo Credit: Carlos Cruz
TheWaster.com | Listen Up
10.20.2025
