Bands will always sound like this: jangly and raw, infatuated with their own youth, terribly and vaguely romantic, tripping over themselves in their haste to convey a botanic garden’s worth of full-bloom feelings. Radio DDR, the second album by Sharp Pins (the solo project of Lifeguard’s Kai Slater) is a giddy blast of power pop that understands, deeply, that the genre’s only goal should be to make age-old feelings like love and longing sound thrilling and new. It succeeds and surpasses that goal: Familiar but finely tuned, it’s likely to remind you of whatever music felt most romantic to you when you were growing up. For me, that’s Royal Headache and the Beatles and Hunx and His Punx and Girls; for you, maybe the Kinks or Cleaners From Venus or Alvvays. The album’s recombinant DNA is an asset—or, at the very least, not a hindrance—because 20-year-old Slater is also one of contemporary indie-rock’s sharpest pop songwriters, each of the record’s 14 songs containing its own cosmos of urgent choruses and natty phrases and artfully scrawled riffs. Radio DDR earns its comparison points, slamming you so hard and so frequently with scream-a-long hooks that it feels like a greatest-hits collection.
In addition to his duties in Sharp Pins, Slater is a lynchpin of Chicago’s young, fruitful guitar band scene: He runs a zine called Hallogallo that shares its name with a prolific DIY collective that also includes Horsegirl, Post Office Winter, and Slater’s other bands, Lifeguard and Dwaal Troupe. He’s also obsessed with youth culture, and to read him talk about its centrality in his life—“the only thing that I know I can do in the world is make youth spaces,” he says—unlocks a layer of meaning within Radio DDR. These songs are about love, by and large, but they also ache with the notion that certain parts of life will inevitably slip away. They lurch forward urgently, like Slater is trying to bottle the feeling of being young before the fountain runs dry.
Is it frustrating that society and pop culture writ large centers around Being Young? Maybe, but it’s an easier pill to swallow when it tastes this good. The halting boogie of “You Have A Way” is a vortex of anxieties and boredoms that can boil down to one lyric—“Can I find a time with you?” Meanwhile, Slater chases “the seconds/I can’t suspend anymore” on the frantic, anthemic garage barnstormer “Is It Better.” “I Can’t Stop” sounds like something Royal Headache’s Shogun might have made in his teenage bedroom, and one repeated lyric makes this theme even more explicit: “I don’t wanna get older no more.”
All of Radio DDR carries this feeling of racing against the clock, which is part of the (perhaps oxymoronic) appeal: Slater’s lyrics reflect the invincibility and assuredness of youth, but his melodies are shot through with the melancholy that comes with getting older and realizing that the infallibility of your late teens and early 20s is just another ephemeral feeling. Slater makes these feelings sound impossibly potent: The “ahh-ahh-ahh” on “Storma Lee” is wistful enough to cause palpitations in even the sturdiest heart; when he sings “If I was ever lonely/Oh, how it’d tear me apart,” hitting those last three words with a glam swagger, you want to laugh at the hubris and the excitement of it all. This contradictory, lovestruck aura fills every corner of Radio DDR; it’s immensely gratifying to listen and remember that bands like Sharp Pins will keep striving to capture these ineffable feelings as long as people are having them. (Which is to say: forever.)
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More than most bands that began in the backseat of the family car, Car Seat Headrest seem well-suited for a high-concept rock opera. From the band’s earliest days, when the project was just Will Toledo recording alone in Virginia, songs were never just as simple as singer and subject—his 2011 album Twin Fantasy was a romantic epic sheepishly masquerading as a ramshackle emo record. His 2020 record Making a Door Less Open was essentially a treatise on fame itself, and culminated in Toledo adopting the persona “Trait,” a gas-masked, bunny-eared protagonist previously introduced in a Car Seat Headrest side project called 1 Trait Danger. When Car Seat Headrest began teasing their new record, The Scholars, via an alternate reality game-style website, it felt like an appropriately elaborate rollout for a band who’s rarely taken reality at face value.
And yet, Toledo was hesitant to dive head-on into the full-scale world-building of a rock opera. To hear him tell it, he seemed afraid that he might stumble into one of the genre’s many pitfalls. “You pull something off of The Wall—it’s not necessarily going to be banging on its own. It needs that context,” he told the podcast How Long Gone. “I like when you can pull a song out and have that individual piece.” It’s a brutal assessment of Pink Floyd, though it comes from a deep respect (the original version of Twin Fantasy’s “High to Death” interpolated “Jugband Blues,” after all).
On The Scholars, every song aims to be an “Another Brick in the Wall Pt. 2”—nine self-contained epics that, Toledo hopes, will sum to a greater whole. But overburdened by a confusing plot, with no room for a listener to digest the bevvy of settings and characters he’s just introduced, The Scholars is mired in and muddied by the madcap impulses of its creator, drowning out what would otherwise be some of the band’s most inspired, experimental compositions to date. The Scholars is a rock opera for the playlist era; it wants to contain both a richly textured narrative—with all the character development, internal motivations, and rising and falling action required therein—and also nine songs that can stand alone, plucked out of context and jutted up against whatever other songs happen to land on Spotify’s autoplay.
So, the plot: The Scholars takes us to the imaginary Parnassus University, where we meet a cast of students who are all on parallel searches for meaning: our narrator, the Chanticleer; Beolco, a playwright who’s paranoid his best ideas are behind him: “A thousand ideas piled up in the tomb,” he says on “CCF (I’m Gonna Stay With You)”; Devereaux, the “son of a backwaters religious conservative” who hopes to find higher meaning on the libertine lawns of the American university (“Devereaux”); and Rosa, a medical student who can revive the dead (“Gethsemane”). There is also, of course, a local community based on dressing in furs and feathers (“Lady Gay Approximately”), which I’ll let the Redditors decipher.
These plot points matter as much as you care to listen closely: There are pivotal moments in the form of a deadly plant and clown raid that I somehow missed in the first listen, too distracted by the stylistic changeups and clouded metaphors crammed into every song. Most of the key narrative drivers are buried in liner notes on the lyric sheet but aren't represented anywhere in the music. Certain songs carry enough momentum to warrant repeat listens out of the album context: “The Catastrophe (Good Luck With That, Man)” takes the familiar punk-leaning pop shape that has defined Car Seat Headrest, the chiming strums of an acoustic guitar giving way to drum fills, reverb, and Toledo’s fuzzy, clipped vocals. The same goes for “True/False Lover,” which careens from guitar solo to verse with the practiced ease of someone who’s spent the past 15 years writing hooks.
But the preceding three songs, which range from 10 minutes on the short end to 18 at the longest, test the premise of the album and the patience of the listener. “Gethsemane” begins quietly with just a synth and Toledo’s voice; “Reality” brings to mind Air’s Moon Safari; “Planet Desperation” is the most forthrightly self-serious, with somber piano and the slow beat of a kick drum. Yet they all manage to wind up in about the same place at their halfway points—stuttering prog interludes, towering electric guitar solos, belted refrains that seem to come out of nowhere and fade just as quickly. Storylines are lost in the mayhem: I feel like I’m catching the plot but then as soon as guitarist Ethan Ives, as Parnassus’ Liberal Arts school dean Hyacinth, sings “I would go out/But there’s a world war,” I feel totally lost again. It’s almost impressive how much these disparate modes seem to converge on a central sound, and how much that sound boils down to: play loud, play fast, repeat. There’s a reason, it seems, that The Wall includes comparatively quieter tracks like “Empty Spaces” or “One of My Turns”—if every song needs to stand alone, they each require some sort of internal climax, a summit that feels exhausting to climb song after song.
Still, The Scholars is filled with compelling experimentation and glimpses of greater potential. Toledo’s voice sounds stronger than ever here, warmly recorded in analog, and songs like “Devereaux,” which lean into power pop influences like the Cars and Cheap Trick, feel like the most successful attempt to combine narrative with concise songcraft. “CCF,” one of the album’s standout songs, sounds like a potential future path for Car Seat Headrest—one that introduces elements of jazz and funk to his fundamentally scrappy sound without overpowering it with heavy-handed signifiers and seemingly endless trips up and down the neck of his guitar. Car Seat Headrest is a band almost predestined for the kind of high-stakes storytelling a rock opera requires—if only Toledo could let his own ideas breathe.
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