【搬运译】叉婊Pitchfork评Car Seat Headrest 2018年专辑《Twin Fantasy》

搬运自：网易云音乐专栏【Music Online Zine Courier】（在原文基础上添加了英语原文与排版调整）

翻译：豆目豆科

Will Toledo’s re-recorded version of an album originally released in 2011 speaks to his greatest gifts as a songwriter: wit, cynicism, and an eye for detail that captures teenaged desire and heartache.

Will Toledo在这张最初在2011年发行的专辑的重录新版本中，体现了他作为一个作曲家的最显著的天赋：智慧、犬儒主义，以及那能捕捉到青少年欲望和心碎细节的敏锐眼光。

With his band Car Seat Headrest, Will Toledo has constructed the perfect vehicle for his obsessions. Since its inception in 2010, it’s become a highly referential project with a series of related album titles (2015’s Teens of Style preceded 2016’s Teens of Denial) and nods to other songs and bands from the Cars to Modest Mouse to They Might Be Giants. But the connection he makes to the music of others is nothing compared to the density of the internal references. A chorus from one song might show up as the bridge in another; a lyric might connect to an observation made earlier in the record, or even the record before. And Toledo’s constant tinkering goes beyond hiding Easter eggs; he also revisits older recordings until he gets them right. Teens of Style consisted of re-recorded versions of songs culled from his vast catalog (he put out nine releases on Bandcamp before signing to Matador). And now he has taken that re-make/re-model impulse even further.

他的乐队Car Seat Headrest，是Will Toledo为他的痴迷所构建的一个完美载体。自2010年成立以来，它已经成为一个与Toledo自身有着高度参照性的项目，有一系列相关的专辑名称反映了这一点（2015年的《Teens of Style》、2016年的《Teens of Denial》），以及对其他歌曲和乐队的示意，从the Cars到Modest Mouse再到They Might Be Giants。但与和自身的参照密度相比，与其他人的音乐联系就算不上什么了。一首歌曲的副歌可能会出现在另一首歌曲的某个桥段中；一首歌词可能会与唱片中早先透露的细节相联系，甚至在这是之前的唱片。Toledo不断的衔接拼缀已经超出了“隐藏彩蛋”的范畴；他甚至会重新审视过去的唱片，（重新制作它们）直到变作他心目中的模样。《Teens of Style》便是由重新录制的歌曲组成，这些歌曲是从他庞大的曲库中挑选出来的（在与Matador签约之前，他在Bandcamp上发行了九张唱片）。

The new Car Seat Headrest album, Twin Fantasy, is a completely re-recorded version of an album that Toledo originally released in 2011. There’s not much precedent for this sort of do-over—if this were film, say, it’d be like Steven Soderbergh re-making Sex, Lies and Videotape, which I could actually see him doing at some point. But Toledo, two years after his last batch of new songs, apparently believes enough in this album to think that he can make a better version of it to share with the wider world.

Car Seat Headrest的新专辑《Twin Fantasy》是Toledo最初在2011年发行的同名专辑彻头彻尾的重录版本。这种重头来过的先例并不多——如果是电影的话，可以与Steven Soderbergh重新制作《Sex, Lies and Videotape》类比，我们确实可以看到一些电影制作人在某些时候会这样做。但是Toledo，在他最后一批新歌发行的两年后，显然是对这张专辑有足够的信心，认为他可以制作出一个更好的版本，在更广泛的世界中重新分享它。

Twin Fantasy isn’t just another one of Toledo’s Bandcamp albums. It’s an ambitious song cycle that’s been held up by his small but fervent online cult as his masterpiece. The songs explore in painful detail the narrator’s infatuation with a nameless man, a relationship that Toledo has said was based in part on his own experience. It was originally written when Toledo was 19, and the album is appropriately dense with confusion and anxiety and self-doubt, though the self-laceration is characteristically cut with laughs. And whether or not it fits the criteria of a concept album proper (there isn’t a clear narrative from song-to-song), Twin Fantasy feels very much like an album about a single experience. Aside from an offhand comment about an ex or two, there are only two people in every song—the person singing, and the guy to whom it’s addressed (“Most of the time that I use the word ‘you’/Well you know that I’m mostly singing about you,” Toledo sings on “Nervous Young Inhumans”). If the person delivering the lines wasn’t so funny, the level of obsession might be a little scary. But Toledo pulls off an album with a jarring degree of specificity that touches on feelings familiar to almost anyone who has experienced young desire and heartbreak.

如今，“Twin Fantasy”这两个单词已不仅仅局限在Toledo在Bandcamp上的另张同名专辑。这是一次雄心勃勃的歌曲重录，在此之前这张已经被他的那些罕少但狂热的网上乐迷视为杰作了。这些歌曲以对痛苦细致入微的刻画探讨了叙述者对一个无名男子的迷恋，Toledo曾说到这种羁绊部分是基于他自己的经历。这张专辑最初写于Toledo19岁时，专辑恰到好处地塞满了困惑、焦虑和自我怀疑，尽管这种自我谴责、自我剖析往往会用笑声来遮掩它背后的情感。不管它是否符合概念专辑的标准（每首歌之间并没有一个明确的叙事结构），《Twin Fantasy》给人感觉依旧非常像一张关于某一次经历的专辑。除了一两个对前任不经意间的吐槽外，每首歌中只有两个人——歌唱的人和这封书信的收件人（“Most of the time that I use the word ‘you’/Well you know that I’m mostly singing about you,”Toledo在“Nervous Young Inhumans”中这样唱道）。如果讲台词的人并不是那么有风趣，这种痴迷的程度可是有点吓人了。但Toledo以一种令人震惊的细节再现程度重新完成了这张专辑，触及了几乎所有经历过年少时欲望和心碎时刻的人都熟悉的那种感觉。

Toledo’s narrator in Twin Fantasy wants to get so close to the object of his affection that they essentially fuse together, but all he can think about is everything that’s pulling them apart. He sees images of his beloved everywhere (“When the train came it was so big and powerful...I wanted to put my arms around it”) while suspecting they’re too fucked and damaged to make it work (”We were wrecks before we crashed into each other”). He writes about watching movies and taking drugs, relays a story about coming out to his friends while pretending to be drunk, notes that having a body can be a drag. The story he tells is not about what happens, but what almost happens, what he wants to happen, what he wishes didn’t happen. The present moment is always undercut by a memory or a wish; strictly from reading the lyric sheet, it’s never entirely clear if the relationship is something real or something that is happening in Toledo’s head. The promise of pleasure is washed out by feelings of dread.

Toledo在《Twin Fantasy》中所扮演的叙述者想与他的爱慕对象贴近，甚至是融合在一起，但他总会想到的那些阻碍他们、将他们拉开的一切。他到处都能看到他心爱之人的幻象（“When the train came it was so big and powerful... I wanted to put my arms around it”），同时也在怀疑他们所经历的一切都太操蛋了，他们的羁绊已经分崩离析，他们是不可能成功的（”We were wrecks before we crashed into each other”）。他还写到了看电影和吸毒，讲述了一个在假装喝醉时向朋友出柜的故事，甚至还有着“拥有这样一个躯体可能是种拖累”的想法。他讲述的故事并不是那些已然发生的事情，而是那些几乎将要发生的事情、他所期冀的事情、和他希望不曾发生的事情。当下时刻的存在感总是会被一段过往的记忆或一个不切实际幻想所削弱；严格地说，仅仅是从阅读歌词来看，你很难完全分辨清楚这种羁绊是真实存在过的还是仅仅存在于Toledo的脑海之中。那些承诺时的愉悦欣喜也渐渐被恐惧不安所冲淡。

This makes Twin Fantasy sound grim and somber, but it’s actually the opposite. The explosive arrangements and Toledo’s delivery make it much more of a dark comedy. Brilliant individual lines pile up (”My soul yearns for a fugitive from the laws of nature” is a line that Silver Jews’ David Berman wishes he wrote), but the record’s real genius is in how the songs simmer and then burst, in perfect sync with the arc of the feelings. Early highlight “Beach Life-In-Death” stretches over 13 minutes, an epic meditation on raw want and jet-black self-loathing (”I am almost completely soulless, I am incapable of being human…it should be called anti-depression, as a friend of mine suggested, because it’s not the sadness that hurts you, it’s the brain’s reaction against it”) with instantly memorable screamed choruses worthy of the finest power pop.

这可能会使《Twin Fantasy》听起来灰暗而阴郁，但实际效果则恰恰相反。爆破式的结构安排和Toledo真切的表达使它更像一部黑色喜剧。精彩纷呈的单句堆积如山（”My soul yearns for a fugitive from the laws of nature”是Silver Jews乐队的David Berman希望他写下的话），但在这张唱片中真正的天才之处在于这些歌曲是如何酝酿然后迎来爆发的，这与情感的流露曲线完美同步。先行单曲“Beach Life-In-Death”相比原来延长至13分钟，是他对原始欲望和漆黑阴郁的自我厌恶的史诗般的反思（”I am almost completely soulless, I am incapable of being human…it should be called anti-depression, as a friend of mine suggested, because it’s not the sadness that hurts you, it’s the brain’s reaction against it”），其果敢而令人难忘的尖啸副歌让这首歌值得称作有史以来最好的力量流行之一。

“Bodys” has the gleaming pulse of the Strokes, and finds Toledo commenting on the song in real-time as it unfolds—“Is it the chorus yet? No. It’s just a building of the verse, so when the chorus does come it’ll be more rewarding”—and then it delivers on that observation, with layered vocals that bring to mind the stacked harmonies of ELO. The songs never stay still, for better or worse, they’re always in the process of building up or breaking down, which makes this jagged tail feel even more restless.

“Bodys”有着The Strokes乐队闪亮的精神内核，甚至Toledo在歌曲中还对它进行了实时评论——“Is it the chorus yet? No. It’s just a building of the verse, so when the chorus does come it’ll be more rewarding”——随后它也实现了这一观点，有层次的人声让人联想起曾在ELO（70年代乐团Electric Light Orchestra）的音乐中出现的堆叠和声。这些乐曲从未停歇，无论好坏，它们总处在建构或分解的过程中，这也让锯齿状的尾声愈发地令人焦躁不安。

Some will find it shocking that an even lower-fi version of this album exists. The production values are somewhere on the lower end of inexpensive mid-tier indie rock, but the meat-and-potatoes sonics ultimately serve to make the record sound timeless. Give or take a Skype reference, it could have come out in 1994. It’s hard to know how the faithful who have been living with this album for half a decade will take its reinvention. Given the force of the music, the improved sonics give it greater weight, and the existence of two versions somehow makes the whole thing even more interesting—fading memory reflected and then re-assembled—and it’s hard to hear this re-visit as anything but a triumph. Twin Fantasy is not a perfect record—the latter half is bogged down by soundscape-y passages and spoken word, for one thing—but that only validates it as a powerful document of teenaged pain and longing.

（在未来，）有些人会惊讶的发现，这张专辑竟还有一个低保真版本。这张专辑的制作价值只能说是处在廉价的中档独立摇滚的低端，但处在其内在的基色最终使这张专辑所记录的声音经久不衰。根据Skype给出的线索，它可能在1994年就问世了。虽然很难知道那些已经和这张专辑一起经历了很长时间的忠实歌迷会如何看待它的“重塑”，但考虑到音乐的力量，改进后的声效赋予了它更大的分量，而两个版本的存在在某种程度上使整个事情变得更加有趣——消逝的记忆被拾起，然后又被重新组合——人们会很难把这次重头来过看作是什么了不得的事。《Twin Fantasy》并不是一张完美无暇的唱片——后半张可以说被声音场景化的叙述和口语化所限制，但这也更证实了它的确能够作为青少年痛苦和渴望的代言。