搬運自：網(wǎng)易云音樂專欄【Music Online Zine Courier】（在原文基礎(chǔ)上添加了英語原文與排版調(diào)整）

翻譯：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在這張最初在2011年發(fā)行的專輯的重錄新版本中，體現(xiàn)了他作為一個作曲家的最顯著的天賦：智慧、犬儒主義，以及那能捕捉到青少年欲望和心碎細節(jié)的敏銳眼光。

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.

他的樂隊Car Seat Headrest，是Will Toledo為他的癡迷所構(gòu)建的一個完美載體。自2010年成立以來，它已經(jīng)成為一個與Toledo自身有著高度參照性的項目，有一系列相關(guān)的專輯名稱反映了這一點（2015年的《Teens of Style》、2016年的《Teens of Denial》），以及對其他歌曲和樂隊的示意，從the Cars到Modest Mouse再到They Might Be Giants。但與和自身的參照密度相比，與其他人的音樂聯(lián)系就算不上什么了。一首歌曲的副歌可能會出現(xiàn)在另一首歌曲的某個橋段中；一首歌詞可能會與唱片中早先透露的細節(jié)相聯(lián)系，甚至在這是之前的唱片。Toledo不斷的銜接拼綴已經(jīng)超出了“隱藏彩蛋”的范疇；他甚至會重新審視過去的唱片，（重新制作它們）直到變作他心目中的模樣?！禩eens of Style》便是由重新錄制的歌曲組成，這些歌曲是從他龐大的曲庫中挑選出來的（在與Matador簽約之前，他在Bandcamp上發(fā)行了九張唱片）。

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的新專輯《Twin Fantasy》是Toledo最初在2011年發(fā)行的同名專輯徹頭徹尾的重錄版本。這種重頭來過的先例并不多——如果是電影的話，可以與Steven Soderbergh重新制作《Sex, Lies and Videotape》類比，我們確實可以看到一些電影制作人在某些時候會這樣做。但是Toledo，在他最后一批新歌發(fā)行的兩年后，顯然是對這張專輯有足夠的信心，認為他可以制作出一個更好的版本，在更廣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”這兩個單詞已不僅僅局限在Toledo在Bandcamp上的另張同名專輯。這是一次雄心勃勃的歌曲重錄，在此之前這張已經(jīng)被他的那些罕少但狂熱的網(wǎng)上樂迷視為杰作了。這些歌曲以對痛苦細致入微的刻畫探討了敘述者對一個無名男子的迷戀，Toledo曾說到這種羈絆部分是基于他自己的經(jīng)歷。這張專輯最初寫于Toledo19歲時，專輯恰到好處地塞滿了困惑、焦慮和自我懷疑，盡管這種自我譴責、自我剖析往往會用笑聲來遮掩它背后的情感。不管它是否符合概念專輯的標準（每首歌之間并沒有一個明確的敘事結(jié)構(gòu)），《Twin Fantasy》給人感覺依舊非常像一張關(guān)于某一次經(jīng)歷的專輯。除了一兩個對前任不經(jīng)意間的吐槽外，每首歌中只有兩個人——歌唱的人和這封書信的收件人（“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”中這樣唱道）。如果講臺詞的人并不是那么有風趣，這種癡迷的程度可是有點嚇人了。但Toledo以一種令人震驚的細節(jié)再現(xiàn)程度重新完成了這張專輯，觸及了幾乎所有經(jīng)歷過年少時欲望和心碎時刻的人都熟悉的那種感覺。

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》中所扮演的敘述者想與他的愛慕對象貼近，甚至是融合在一起，但他總會想到的那些阻礙他們、將他們拉開的一切。他到處都能看到他心愛之人的幻象（“When the train came it was so big and powerful... I wanted to put my arms around it”），同時也在懷疑他們所經(jīng)歷的一切都太操蛋了，他們的羈絆已經(jīng)分崩離析，他們是不可能成功的（”We were wrecks before we crashed into each other”）。他還寫到了看電影和吸毒，講述了一個在假裝喝醉時向朋友出柜的故事，甚至還有著“擁有這樣一個軀體可能是種拖累”的想法。他講述的故事并不是那些已然發(fā)生的事情，而是那些幾乎將要發(fā)生的事情、他所期冀的事情、和他希望不曾發(fā)生的事情。當下時刻的存在感總是會被一段過往的記憶或一個不切實際幻想所削弱；嚴格地說，僅僅是從閱讀歌詞來看，你很難完全分辨清楚這種羈絆是真實存在過的還是僅僅存在于Toledo的腦海之中。那些承諾時的愉悅欣喜也漸漸被恐懼不安所沖淡。

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.

這可能會使《Twin Fantasy》聽起來灰暗而陰郁，但實際效果則恰恰相反。爆破式的結(jié)構(gòu)安排和Toledo真切的表達使它更像一部黑色喜劇。精彩紛呈的單句堆積如山（”My soul yearns for a fugitive from the laws of nature”是Silver Jews樂隊的David Berman希望他寫下的話），但在這張唱片中真正的天才之處在于這些歌曲是如何醞釀然后迎來爆發(fā)的，這與情感的流露曲線完美同步。先行單曲“Beach Life-In-Death”相比原來延長至13分鐘，是他對原始欲望和漆黑陰郁的自我厭惡的史詩般的反思（”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”），其果敢而令人難忘的尖嘯副歌讓這首歌值得稱作有史以來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”有著The Strokes樂隊閃亮的精神內(nèi)核，甚至Toledo在歌曲中還對它進行了實時評論——“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”——隨后它也實現(xiàn)了這一觀點，有層次的人聲讓人聯(lián)想起曾在ELO（70年代樂團Electric Light Orchestra）的音樂中出現(xiàn)的堆疊和聲。這些樂曲從未停歇，無論好壞，它們總處在建構(gòu)或分解的過程中，這也讓鋸齒狀的尾聲愈發(fā)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.

（在未來，）有些人會驚訝的發(fā)現(xiàn)，這張專輯竟還有一個低保真版本。這張專輯的制作價值只能說是處在廉價的中檔獨立搖滾的低端，但處在其內(nèi)在的基色最終使這張專輯所記錄的聲音經(jīng)久不衰。根據(jù)Skype給出的線索，它可能在1994年就問世了。雖然很難知道那些已經(jīng)和這張專輯一起經(jīng)歷了很長時間的忠實歌迷會如何看待它的“重塑”，但考慮到音樂的力量，改進后的聲效賦予了它更大的分量，而兩個版本的存在在某種程度上使整個事情變得更加有趣——消逝的記憶被拾起，然后又被重新組合——人們會很難把這次重頭來過看作是什么了不得的事?！禩win Fantasy》并不是一張完美無暇的唱片——后半張可以說被聲音場景化的敘述和口語化所限制，但這也更證實了它的確能夠作為青少年痛苦和渴望的代言。