The Scholars

Will Toledo’s music as Car Seat Headrest has always <i>felt</i> like opera whether he called it that or not—at least, few other indie bands have made the droll monotonies of being an outcast sound so grand. A concept album nominally about a med-school student who discovers her secret powers to heal patients by literally absorbing their pain (yep!), <i>The Scholars</i> is both Toledo and his band’s most conventionally “big” album (soaring choruses, dramatic turns, multi-part songs) and its most cryptic, tucking all those big, obvious gestures into the folds of a story that feels just out of reach by design.

The short songs hit hardest (“The Catastrophe,” “Devereaux”), but the long ones are where they get to make their weird stadium-sized dreams come true. Case in point, the 19-minute centerpiece “Planet Desperation”: Toldeo howls, “When I get to the pearly gates, will I see you on the inside pointing at me/Mouthing ‘There he is, officer—there’s the prick I warned you about.” Then they get to sound like The Who. Then a little bit like Genesis. Then the hand-drum section comes in.