BASED OFF PROMPT 7

 

Anchorite (Love You Very Much) – Car Seat Headrest

Car Seat Headrest is a band lead by Will Toledo, where he uses his music to talk about chapters of his life. In this particular song, Anchorite, Toledo talks about how he needs to move on from a relationship from the long past. It’s sort of like a “goodbye” piece. It may seem like a bizarre choice for a music class, but the participatory discrepancy within the song, more specifically towards the end, I find very interesting.

The song itself is over 14 minutes long, which at the start sounds awfully long. However, the majority of the piece flows without any proper structure, as Toledo describes his relationship and the need to move on from the feelings of sadness, the timbre of the music is muted with a hint of distortion to the singular guitar accompanying the vocals. The discrepancy in the sound at the start is very minimal; it reflects the guilt in his voice describing his past. As the song progresses, however, more and more instruments get added to the background, with another guitar and drums joining the soundscape. The song grows louder as his words intensify towards the person, with the lyrics repeating the words “it’s such a drag” and the strumming of guitar getting more frequent. The buildup to the first release of sound at around 8 minutes is filled with highly distorted sounds of the drums, filling the song with an intense feeling, while the guitar strumming gets to its most distorted yet. The vocals of Toledo can be heard echoing throughout these sounds. The first high ends after a minute so and the song grows quieter. In this quiet area, Toledo expresses  anger towards the person, screaming obscenities that bounce through the overgrowing distortion that yet again is building. For the last 2 minutes of the song, the distortion within the sound goes to its highest yet, overpowering the music, signifying the release of anger and freedom Toledo had within him, and after that, the song abruptly ends.

The obvious main discrepancy that is notable within the song is the overwhelming use of distorted sounds throughout the song. What I enjoy a lot about the use of the sound is how the amount of distortion represents the release and anger that Toledo has. At the start, it’s small and confined, the sound feels extremely boxed in. But as he learns to release his emotions bottled in from the past, the sound of the song grows more louder and distorted. The discrepancy that usually ruins a good song (bad mixing, distortion, unclear sound), is being used here to further solidify the emotional release of Toledo.