Following a tradition that reaches back to the The Who’s Tommy, bands and musicians with serious artistic ambition have created rock operas, reaching beyond the thematic explorations pioneered in concept albums a form that transcends the limits of the three minute popular song. Singer and guitarist Will Toledo, the leader of Car Seat Headrest, is the latest to throw himself into the drama and story-telling that an opera requires.
It’s not clear how this would play out on stage – and to that extent, it may not strciktly speaking be an operatic work – but “The Scholars” consists of a parade of characters – Beolco, Devereaux, Hyacinth, and an Artemis who seems to have no connection with the ancient Greek virgin goddess of hunting. Each character is briefly described in the album notes, several of them associated with places of learning or initiation, one of which is a college know as Parnassus – the mountain in which the muses reside. There is Chantecleer as well, a kind of one man chorus, with connections to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and the courtly love of the medieval troubadours. There is something scholarly about the whole enterprise: this is rock that reaches far beyond the genre’s roots in the blues.
There is no obvious story-line, but more of a tortuous and poetically-inspired journey, that dips in and out of darkness and light, suggesting a fashionably apocalyptic vision of the word which references spiritual themes whose opacity is at once mysterious and frustrating.
Underlying the whole, there's Toledo’s complex gender identity, evoked at various times in lyrics that speak of a mother that still figures large in his adult life. The multiple characters, described by Toledo as “Companions” are clearly sub-personalities, aspects of the narrator’s tortured psyche. This is first-person opera, almost a contradiction in terms as it excludes the clear focus on interpersonal or family tragedy, often an essential element in a cohenrently structured dramatic experience.
The music often buids up (or explodes) into a full-on mix of grunge and metal, with dramatic flashes of guitar and pummelling drums. The song structures, as in the style of the band’s previous albums, is almost symphonic, with a succession of movements, in which moods and rhythm are contrasted as the piece evolves. There are echoes of prog – and even pomp – rock at times, the sounds a little too portentous, as if opera demanded an electric version of typically grandiose Wagner. Rock heroes easily adopt a mythical status, as romantic, quasi-shamanistic figures: they seek not just self-expression but a form a self-discovery through mask and costume- wearing, as Peter Gabriel did in his Genesis years, or Bowie as Ziggy Stardust.
“I could be Ziggy come back down again” Toledo sings on the strongest track of the collection, “Planet Desperation”, with allusions to the end of the world, and the half-promise of something that reaches beyond the dualities of true and false, embracing an ambuguous but all-pervading love. There are plenty of ravishing moments in this complex piece – opera or not – but the whole perplexes rather than convinces, shot through with mystery that fails to unlock its secrets.
