One Liner: Solo-ish guy dropped the DIY and now makes the best kind of confessional rock and roll.
Wikipedia Genre: Indie rock, lo-fi
Home: Leesburg, VA (but now in Seattle)
Poster Position: First Quarter - Line 6
Day: Saturday
Weekend Two Only (SADNESS).
T-Mobile Stage at 4:00.
Thoughts: Saw him/them when they were last here in 2017 and it was a great show. Well, I'll readily admit that their charisma is not their strong suit, but the tunes themselves were excellent.
Overall, I love this dude. The backstory on the main guy (Will Toledo) is that he would go make his music in the back seat of his old car, and so he named the band after the thing that he looked at the whole time. Makes for kind of a clunky band name, but if you just get over that and jam 2016's Teens of Denial, you'll be on board. At first, he was self-releasing stuff on Bandcamp, but since then he's been putting out legit albums with a full band that sounds like R.E.M. or Replacements grew up listening to Black Flag or The Smiths. The early tapes are not the stuff I'm in love with - very DIY and lo-fi - but 2015's Teens of Style and then 2016's Teens of Denial are the stuff you want to start with in my opinion.
2015's Teens of Style boasts "Something Soon" as its second-most listened-to track, at 12.2 million streams.
Those Beach Boys harmonies are killer, as is the entire tune. I'm a fan of that thing. When I originally looked at this album, I decided that the effects on his voice were annoyingly overused. I'll still go with that, but I like the album more now with time.
The next album is the even better one, that made my top ten albums of the year list and still jams. This album is actually really great. Teens of Style was more lo-fi and dissolved, but this one has a real cohesive alt-rock/garage rock sound kind of Replacements-y ("Fill In the Blank") and sometimes Strokes-y ("Vincent") and sometimes R.E.M.-y (aspects of many of these songs) enough to be really cool sounding. Several great songs that I still play even years after my first look at this disc - "Fill in the Blank," with 42.7 million streams, and "Destroyed by Hippie Powers," with 25.3 million streams - are both great tunes. Crunchy grungy goodness. The breakdown and re-smashing at 4:20 in that latter song freaking rules (and includes cow bell). But, the streaming winner is "Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales" with 65.6 million streams.
It's the second verse that kills me, before the harder tune kicks in at 3:18, which is also extra cool. "It's too late to articulate it, That empty feeling, You share the same fate as the people you hate, You build yourself up against others' feelings, And it left you feeling empty as a car coasting downhill, I have become such a negative person, It was all just an act, It was all so easily stripped away." and then "IT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE LIKE THIS!" I'm fully prepared to yell my throat raw to that line in concert.
A likely useless aside that just popped into my head. I went to a tiny college, where drinking was a pretty regular part of passing the time. One drinking game in particular, named "Drunk Driver," was painfully ripe for cheating, and I can recall abusing Stephen with it when he was already too hammered to see me switching out the cards on him. Sorry, buddy. Glad you still talk to me.
This whole album is excellent. "Unforgiving Girl (She's Not An)" was the first moment when I realized that this sounded very much like mid-80's R.E.M., mainly from the guitar strummage. "Destroyed by Hippie Powers" jams, especially when it breaks down into quiet at about 3:50 and then cow bell kicks in with full band roar to fire up the remainder of the song at 4:21. "Joe Gets Kicked Out of School for Using) Drugs With Friends (but Says This Isn't a Problem)" wins the title contest and also rocks out after the intro portion. Just go queue this album up on Spotify and check it out.
So, the band was originally just Will Toledo doing experimental stuff on his own. Strangely, Toledo's real name is William Barnes. At first, he recorded as 63rd Fret, Nervous Young Men, and Mr. Yay Okay, before finding his new identity. After a year at Virginia Commonwealth, he transferred to William & Mary and released an album called Twin Fantasy. We will talk more about that album later. But, of note to here, he graduated, moved to Seattle, signed to Matador Records, and put together a full four-piece band as of 2015 (when those two above albums became the thing). So, it is a good thing he grabbed the full band!
In 2018, they re-recorded the Twin Fantasy disc with the full band, and released it back out to the public. It is great. I'd love to go talk to 10 year old Jack right about now, to let him know that someday, you'll listen to more than just R.E.M. and U2 and Midnight Oil, and instead you'll listen to a handful of bands where their band names sound like some complicated list of phrases you need to use the next time you play MadLibs. This post is especially on point. So, as a reminder, this album was actually released in 2011, to little fanfare. If I ever heard the original tunes, I have no recollection, but these version are freaking good. Like his last kickass album, this is full of 90's buzz bin fuzzbox guitars and his plaintive singing, but this one sounds like lyrics to a lost lover or crush. The track they kept playing on the radio a few years back is no where near the top tune by now, which is always interesting to me. "Nervous Young Inhumans" is that one, with 12.5 million streams, and it shows off some Beach Boy harmonies and 80's synths added in to the buzzy rock sound.
For some reason, that video is only 3:07 long, while the track on the album is 5:26. I guess that is the more popular single edit, which is probably actually a good thing, because the last few minutes of the real track are of Toledo mumbling a long spoken-word screed. The other track that rules is "Beach Life-in-Death," but it is 13:19 minutes long, which is a little long for the blog. But it rules, like a multi-part song that builds and jams, then mellows out, and then builds even higher with the power pop, super-yellable chorus "the ocean washed over your grave!" That line gets mirrored again in "Famous Prophets (Stars)," the other crazy long tune (16:10). This album is very good. The actual streaming champ from the album is "Sober to Death" with 71.4 million streams.
Finally, we get 2020's Making a Door Less Open. This one lands out of left field, a little bit. The album literally includes an EDM beat drop ("Deadlines (Thoughtful)") to go along with his normal indie rock tunes. At first, that track sounds more like an LCD Soundsystem tune, before the true EDM-ness pops in. Which, at first, was a major turnoff, and now that I've heard it a few more times, got me kind of fired up. I just danced so hard in my crappy home office chair I worried it might crack. Same with "Famous," where at first the heavy electronics pushed me away, but after repeat streams I've started grooving it. But he still does good rock and roll licks, like the opening to "Hollywood," which I want to tattoo on my eardrum. And "Deadlines (Hostile)" is back to the normal bashing indie rock that he did so well on his previous discs. I figured that "Must Be More Than Blood" would be the hit track, with its loopy, laid back sound, but it's actually "Can't Cool Me Down," which feels like something Napoleon Dynamite should do a sweet dance routine to. 12.7 million streams (the only track on here that breaks 8 figures).
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