Greater than most bands that started within the backseat of the household automotive, Automobile Seat Headrest appears well-suited for a high-concept rock opera. From the band’s earliest days, when the challenge was simply Will Toledo recording alone in Virginia, songs had been by no means simply so simple as singer and topic—his debut Twin Fantasy was a romantic epic sheepishly masquerading as a ramshackle emo document. His 2020 document Making a Door Much less Open was basically a treatise on fame itself, and culminated in Toledo adopting the persona “Trait,” a gas-masked, bunny-eared protagonist beforehand launched in a Automobile Seat Headrest facet challenge referred to as 1 Trait Hazard. When Automobile Seat Headrest started teasing their new document, The Students, by way of an alternate actuality game-style web site, it felt like an appropriately elaborate rollout for a band who’s hardly ever taken actuality at face worth.
And but, Toledo was hesitant to dive head-on into the full-scale world-building of a rock opera. To listen to him inform it, he appeared afraid that he would possibly stumble into one of many style’s many pitfalls. “You pull one thing off of The Wall—it’s not essentially going to be banging by itself. It wants that context,” he informed the podcast How Lengthy Gone. “I like when you’ll be able to pull a music out and have that particular person piece.” It’s a brutal evaluation of Pink Floyd, although it comes from a deep respect (the unique model of Twin Fantasy’s “Excessive to Demise” interpolated “Jugband Blues,” in any case).
On The Students, each music goals to be an “One other Brick within the Wall Pt. 2”—9 self-contained epics that, Toledo hopes, will sum to a higher complete. However overburdened by a complicated plot, with no room for a listener to digest the bevvy of settings and characters he’s simply launched, The Students is mired in and muddied by the madcap impulses of its creator, drowning out what would in any other case be a number of the band’s most impressed, experimental compositions up to now. The Students is a rock opera for the playlist period; it desires to include each a richly textured narrative—with all of the character growth, inner motivations, and rising and falling motion required therein—and likewise 9 songs that may stand alone, plucked out of context and jutted up towards no matter different songs occur to land on Spotify’s autoplay.
So, the plot: The Students takes us to the imaginary Parnassus College, the place we meet a solid of scholars who’re all on parallel searches for which means: our narrator, the Chanticleer; Beolco, a playwright who’s paranoid his finest concepts are behind him: “A thousand concepts piled up within the tomb,” he says on “CCF (I’m Gonna Keep With You)”; Devereaux, the “son of a backwaters non secular conservative” who hopes to seek out increased which means on the libertine lawns of the American college (“Devereaux”); and Rosa, a medical pupil who can revive the lifeless (“Gethsemane”). There may be additionally, after all, a local people based mostly on dressing in furs and feathers (“Woman Homosexual Roughly”), which I’ll let the Redditors decipher.