Album Review- Car Seat Headrest

 You know I wasn’t going to write about the MADLO Influences EP by Car Seat Headrest. Released this summer, it was paired with a remix EP to re-promote 2020s Making a Door Less Open.

Not that it isn’t easy to write about it. Local public radio played it a bunch and why not- it’s the mix of one of the biggest indie bands and some well known covers.

I wasn’t going to write about it but I looked at a crowdsourced website and we’ll, let’s say I have never seen a more publicly hated album in quite a long time. Now CSH certainly draws attention but I kind of dug MADLO Influences. So here we are.

For starters, the four song cover EP is the most useless form of musical art.

Why is that? One of the more famous EPs of this type is Faith No More’s “Songs to Make Love To”. I bought it. So did everyone else.

Why? Certainly not value for the money. Why did we buy cassingles? U2 had a famous four song EP but it’s really a single player live and 3 B sides. Peel Sessions always sold in four songs. Surely, that seems short now.

Yet I consider Primus’s Miscellaneous Debris to be fantastic. Was there something magical in the fifth song (oh the selection of songs and the Primus spin are the real allure too).

Oh and once you get past five songs, there’s Whatever is Cool With Me, Ska Core the Devil and More, and Jar of Flies to name a few, but at that many songs, it feels like a finished product.

So the four song cover EP is doomed from the start. That it’s a buzzed band and well known songs- we should have known the backlash would be inevitable.

So while I can’t get that excited, I kind of dug it.

MADLO: Influences starts with Golden Years. I suspect like most people my age and under, this seems like an unusual song. It’s so iconic and unusual, that I have vacillated between loving it and hating it, but even so those terms like liking and not liking don’t seem appropriate, it just is. Like the Mona Lisa.

Anyway maybe it’s just me- the other era’s singles are Fame (overplayed and I’m done with it) and Young Americans (overplayed but I could listen everyday) Golden Years is probably the latter.

CSH catches a certain world weariness that is in the original and takes a stab at the falsetto.

Personally, while I would not recommend attempting this song, CSH largely succeed. It is of note, that Moby just released a new album with cover of Heroes. Moby is certainly paying homage not only to the song but the legend of it.

In this CSH in its simplicity is one of the better Bowie covers that comes to mind.

The second song is Substitute. I think I have heard this song too much in versions by The Who and the Sex Pistols. I can’t say much but it is what it is, but CSH does catch a similar intensity to Daltrey. Not bad at all.

Nine Inch Nails March of the Pigs probably gets the most reaction. I suspect this is a Holy Grail for most of CSHs fans who grew up on it.

But I always considered it a bit of a punk song so the shambolic cover with guitarist Ethan Ives on vocals (to me) feels like it has the power of the original.

Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill is on the other side of the spectrum to me. It’s a song so good that anyone can cover it, and it works.

I do like the CSH cover here. Will and the band really put their all into it. It feels sonically ambitious and the vocals nail a certain sense of longing.

Overall, I kind of love this unloved set of songs. Each song may be different from each other but they could easily fit on a CSH album. In that, I have to say I’m impressed.