About this new release, he stated:

[su_quote]A crush can really live on its own, separate from you and the person you are pining for. The fantasy feels like its own world, obsession can turn the person you are longing for in to a monument that has less and less to do with them and more to do with the idea of love itself and what it can do, what it can soothe or quiet or light on fire. I wanted to show that maddening, solitary part of desire but keep the core which is a real warmth and belief that you have something crucial to share with each other.[/su_quote]

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As announced some days ago, Perfume Genius will release a remix EP of his amazing album “No Shape.” The 6-track project will feature new versions signed by mmph, Jam City, Laurel Halo and Blake Mills. Following up on previously shared King Princess‘ remix of “Run Me Through,” Mike Hadreas already unveiled a new song from the EP. Here comes the Mura Masa‘s take on “Slip Away.” Tune in below.

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Perfume Genius – “Reshaped EP” Tracklist:

1. Braid (mmph Remix)

2. Slip Away (Mura Masa Remix)

3. Just Like Love (Jam City Remix)

4. Die 4 You (Laurel Halo Remix)

5. Every Night (Blake Mills Remix)

6. Run Me Through (King Princess Remix)

Last year, Perfume Genius released “No Shape,” one of our favourite albums of 2017. Today, the artist is back with a King Princess‘ remix of “Run Me Through” which comes ahead a 6-track remix EP named “Reshaped.” Other remixers include mmph, Mura Masa, Jam City, Laurel Halo and Blake Mills who is already credited for the production of “No Shape.”

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Earlier this year, he also dropped three new tracks and video on Youtube.

Perfume Genius – “Reshaped” EP:

01 “Braid (mmph Remix)”

02 “Slip Away (Mura Masa Remix)”

03 “Just Like Love (Jam City Remix)”

04 “Die 4 You (Laurel Halo Remix)”

05 “Every Night (Blake Mills Remix)”

06 “Run Me Through (King Princess Remix)”

Back then, the album represented a huge step forwards for the young singer-songwriter out of Virginia – listen to his first five Bandcamp releases as Car Seat Headrest and you won’t find anything that comes close to the musical and lyrical depths he reached in “Twin Fantasy”, a high-concept, genre-spanning album that boasts a mirrored structure, recurrent fourth wall breaks and an impressive intertextual network that you just don’t see in most popular music – let alone in records made by teenagers whose only recording equipment is a computer and its pre-installed software.

For an album that among many other things warns the listener about the dangers inherent in aligning too closely with an artist you admire, it didn’t take long for “Twin Fantasy” to become object of a dedicated online cult. And it did so for very good reasons. I’m not speaking exclusively for myself when I say that “Twin Fantasy” isn’t only the kind of record people get into after a tough break-up, or while being in the midst of a complicated long-distance relationship; it’s a formative album, one that opens windows to new ways of thinking about music, about art and about love. It’s no wonder that most people that hold “Twin Fantasy” in such high esteem became obsessed with it during their late teens/early twenties – and let us not forget how old Toledo was when he wrote it. But it’s not like “Twin Fantasy” is one of many angst-ridden albums that fans look back on fondly in a vain attempt to re-capture their youth. It’s much more than that – a complex work of art with an astonishing amount of interpretative elements, brimming with musical and lyrical motifs that transcend the extremely personal backstory from which it was born. “Twin Fantasy” has stood the test of time; it still holds up as a great lo-fi album more than six years after its release. So why record it again?

Despite all its technical sloppiness, “Twin Fantasy” was a perfect album for many people. But it wasn’t for everyone. I can’t even remember the amount of times I’ve been told that even though the songs are fine, the whole thing sounds like absolute shit. To this day, I still think the lo-fi-ness (is this a word? Let’s pretend that it is a word) of the original recording is a huge part of its appeal, as Will Toledo used the limitations of his pretty much non-existent recording equipment to create a warm, endearingly off-kilter aesthetic whose bond with the lyrical themes of the album worked like a charm. After spending a few weeks with this re-recorded version titled “Face to Face”, I’ve come to realize that there was an entire side of “Twin Fantasy” that had been hidden from us, one that can be expansive and ambitious while retaining the original appeal of the 2011 version.

Toledo has gone to state that he saw the original “Twin Fantasy” – now re-named as “Mirror to Mirror”- as an incomplete project. He might have been right, but it turns out that what the album needed wasn’t just a slight re-tweaking in the song-writing and a six-figure recording budget. What it truly needed was its own twin, a different glance to be thrown at Toledo’s fantasy. Mature enough to offer a second opinion on a significant part of his life, Toledo is not the same person he was in 2011, and he certainly isn’t the same musician. A re-recorded version of an album he wrote seven years ago was always going to be very different from the original product. It also helps that he’s not completely on his own this time round – Toledo’s band members have a quite distinctive and immediately recognizable playing style: Ethan Ives’s guitar licks bring in a rock and roll tone that was certainly absent from the original; Seth Dalby’s Colin Greenwood-like bass lines provide a much-needed sense of professional restraint, and Andrew Katz might be the best current indie rock drummer this side of Bryan Devendorf.

Toledo has changed as a singer, as a producer and as a lyricist. He feels more comfortable having someone else interpolate fragments from the New Testament into his songs than quoting a fatalistic passage from The Book of Kings himself. He’d rather have Frank Ocean’s voice than Dan Bejar’s. He has found out that “galvanistic” is not a real word. For the most part, his songs refuse to be pinned down to a typical verse-chorus-verse structure, while his lyrics stand in an interesting middle ground between High Modernist levels of referencing an unlikely wide range of different texts and the confessional spirit that permeates some of the most touching lines of the album.

Car Seat Headrest‘s “Twin Fantasy” is simply one of the best albums ever made nothing more, nothing less

“Face to Face” is not a more palatable version of the album that can reach a wider audience; it is a complete reimagining of Toledo’s original fantasy. Sure, it’s the same ten songs than in the original version, and a couple of them have been left almost untouched: the noisy tone-setter opening track “My Boy (Twin Fantasy)” has been given just a few minor tweaks, while “Stop Smoking (We Love You)”, the brief Pollard-esque acoustic plead that serves as a sedative after the heart-wrenching frenzy of “Beach Life-in-Death”, is simply a better-sounding version of its 2011 counterpart. Some other tracks have been largely re-written; others, even if staying true to the original in terms of their structure and lyrics, have been given an entirely new life: “Beach Life-in-Death” remains the same three-headed monster that functions as the centrepiece of the album’s first side, but its last act has been greatly revamped, effectively becoming the song’s emotional apex: “Oh please, let me join your cult / I’ll paint my face in your colours”, Will Toledo desperately begs over an impressive wall of distorted guitars.

A handful of songs have been altered almost beyond recognition, “High to Death” being the prime example of Toledo’s growth as a musician. Whereas the “Mirror to Mirror” version was a noisy, almost shoegaze-y affair that culminated in an instrumental climax, the “Face to Face” recording finds Toledo choosing not to hide behind a distorted vocal filter, as his production takes a page or two off Radiohead’s “A Moon Shaped Pool” to assemble a plaintive slow-burner whose reluctance to build into an epic ending stands in sharp contrast to the euphoric one-two punch of “Bodys” and “Cute Thing”. In fact, it is the album’s upbeat middle section that has been most substantially altered – “Nervous Young Inhumans” and “Bodys” are no longer the slightly awkward songs to which you’d dance alone in your bedroom after putting the blinds down so no one can see you, having in turn become confident, indie disco-ready bangers.

That the album’s middle section trips down a sunnier path than expected turns out to add even more weight to the emotional resonance of the completely devastating last three songs – “High to Death” sees Toledo in a drunken haze, “considering death” and being trapped by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s yellow wallpaper, while the album’s title track, kept under a lo-fi spell similar to that of the “Mirror to Mirror” version, remains one of the saddest pieces of music written in the present decade. But the point on which all things converge is the 16-minute long “Famous Prophets (Stars)”, inarguably Car Seat Headrest’s most accomplished studio production to date. Led by a heavy bassline that seems to carry all the emotional baggage of the eight previous tracks, it starts off as a relatively standard post-punkish song and ends up being a lengthy, cathartic jam that incorporates a riff from a song off one of Toledo’s most obscure albums, ultimately bringing closure to the painstar narrative that he opened in the spoken-word outro to “Nervous Young Inhumans.”

I guess I could go on for ages rambling on about the constant repetition of the album’s lyrical and musical motifs, about how Side B is supposed to mirror Side A, about how Car Seat Headrest’s interpolation of his own older material into some of these tracks is key to understand the new narrative behind the songs, about what it means for an album titled “Twin Fantasy” to be bookended by songs with reverse titles which incorporate the same drumbeat partially lifted off The Ronettes. But I don’t think any of that is necessary, or even pertinent, at this point. The two most telling things I can put forward about how I feel about this album is that I couldn’t bring myself to follow the well-established rule of sticking to the third person while writing a review, and that the only way I can possibly wrap this thing up is by saying that the last time any piece of music resonated so powerfully with me was when I came across some amateur Bandcamp album called “Twin Fantasy”.

The announcement of the release of a new version of Car Seat Headrest‘s album “Twin Fantasy” is not a surprise. After the release of “Beach Life-In-Death” some weeks ago, the suspense was almost gone. Will Toledo recorded this key album at age 19 in his bedroom and on a budget, letting the artist with a feeling of unaccomplishment. Centered around his affective life and first love, “Twin Fantasy” was too important and personal for the artist not to be re-recorded with proper means. Now that the success is here and that he is signed to Matador, he can finally give the album the density it deserves. As Will Toledo detailed:

[su_quote]It was never a finished work, and it wasn’t until last year that I figured out how to finish it.[/su_quote]

He also shared on his Facebook page:

[su_quote]As you may have heard or guessed, TWIN FANTASY is coming to stores this February as a complete set of new recordings. I have spent the past two years (or seven, depending on how you look at it) working and reworking it, and am very excited to finally release the finished version into the world. [/su_quote]

This is not really a new album, it will just sound like he always wanted it to. Coming with this announcement, the artist also unveils a self-directed video for the second single of the album: “Nervous Young Inhumans”. Put your dancing shoes and watch it below.

Car Seat Headrest‘s “Twin Fantasy” is due out on February 16 via Matador Records.

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Keep it up with Will Toledo and Car Seat Headrest via Facebook and Twitter.

A genuine and intimate take on a young woman’s struggles with depression and existential angst, Julien Baker‘s new album “Turn Out The Lights” tackles some generation-troubling stuff from a rather anachronic standpoint; though her work boasts back-to-basics ideals, it nonetheless never comes off as stagnant or even indulges in slipping into the nostalgic side. By refusing to be pinned down to any specific narrative, Baker belongs to a lineage of singer-songwriters who, like Elliott Smith or Tori Amos back in the 90s, have always seemed to be slightly out of touch with the artistic ethos of their contemporaries. Funnily enough, those are always the artists who end up making the truly lasting statements on the times they inhabited, and this insultingly young Tennessee singer-songwriter (she has just turned 22) has a good shot at entering that pantheon when it’s all said and done.

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As her first LP under Matador Records, “Turn Out The Lights” represents a new stage in Julien Baker’s career, even if it’s far from being a clean break from her 2015 self-released debut “Sprained Ankle”. An impressive effort that rewards continuity, Baker’s new album finds her mastering the austere, almost minimalist tone that already permeated her debut. Baker’s reliance on her songwriting and singing dotes is translated into a spartan approach to instrumentation that pervades the whole album. Whether they’re played on a spotless, arpeggiated electric guitar (“Sour Breath”, the album’s title track) or on piano (“Claws In Your Back”, “Hurt Less”), the songs on “Turn Out The Lights” rest on fairly simple chord progressions that nevertheless don’t feel overused when she’s singing over them.

Julien Baker‘s “Turn Out The Lights” holds tradition in respect, but its greatness transcends any kind of comparative analysis

It’s pretty clear that Julien Baker has a penchant for the less-is-more current of thought. There’s barely any studio gloss in these songs; the majority of them only feature Baker on vocals over an accompanying instrument, and on the rare occasions when she does bother to drape them with light string arrangements, these float unnoticeably over her melodies. Even for the album’s plentiful climatic moments, Baker rarely relies on studio trickery to get the job done. Album highlight “Sour Breath” ends with Julien Baker yelling the song’s pessimistic final refrain (“The harder I swim / The faster I sink) as all instruments suddenly drop, while she makes the title track reach its emotional apex by, well, just singing louder than before and adding a few extra harmonies.

With its melancholy aura never feeling forced or out of place, “Turn Out The Lights” steers away from sentimentality while managing to retain a deeply emotional core that holds in you in lasting, bitter thrall. Pretty much any other current songwriter trying to make music like this ends up sounding corny and clichéd, but Baker possesses a unique ability to compose songs that pull on your heart strings without making you cringe at the dull try-hardness of it all (*cough* Cigarettes After Sex *cough*).

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“Turn Out The Lights” hurts, and not precisely in a light way; it’s more of a curling up into the fetal position and starting to sob kind of pain. But there’s a lot more to it – behind the all-pervasive sadness that surrounds her music lie layers and layers or morbid lyricism that would have made Morrissey proud back when he was actually writing good songs. Starting off with the pretty self-explanatory lyric “My heart is gonna eat itself”, “Televangelist” is a devastating piano ballad that references amputations and cannibalism without losing any of the wistfulness that Baker evokes with her vocals. Once again led by her uncluttered piano playing, “Hurt Less” presents a speaker who didn’t even care to wear a seatbelt because well, why keep living? But rather than a distressing plunge into misery, Turn Out The Lights is what you might call an emotionally responsible work; it asks questions without shying away from providing answers. And so, the speaker in “Hurt Less” ends up finding a glimmer of hope: “This year I’ve started wearing safety belts when I’m driving / Because when I’m with you / I don’t have to think about myself / And it hurts less.”

Julien Baker‘s “Turn Out The Lights” holds tradition in respect, but its greatness transcends any kind of comparative analysis; it’s an album that exists in its private little space, a cornerstone for Baker to build on her own mythopoeia. It could easily end up being a formative album for a new generation of introverted kids who find relief at Baker’s slacking crooning, but we’ll have to wait a few years to see if that comes true. Sticking only to the present tense, it’s fair to say that “Turn Out The Lights” is a thrilling success that should quickly rise as a late contender for album of the year.

Mike Hadreas played ‘Wreath’ and ‘Just Like Love’.

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‘No Shape’ was released via Matador on May 5 and the artist is touring North America and Europe to support it. Connect with Perfume Genius via Facebook and Twitter to check the full itinerary.

The performances are intense and the atmosphere is even stronger with the epileptic strobe lights.

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By the way, “Adore”, whose excellent video was recently released, entered the HighClouds30 of this week at the 24th position. You can check the full charts here.