Review Summary: The deconstruction of a form.
The release of
Face to Face was, in many respects, as anticlimactic as album releases get -- per Will Toledo's request, Matador did as little outward promotion as possible and held him to no set restrictions regarding touring or interviews, allowing him the freedom to work only the songs he felt comfortable performing into his live sets, answer only the questions he felt actually required consideration. And thus far, the critical reception of the record has provided an incredibly telling counterpoint to the record itself, given that its appraisal has been abjectly positive and yet, paradoxically, almost entirely ignorant of the context that lends it its poignancy as a statement.
Part of this is (obviously) unavoidable. But even if the motivations for its creation hadn't been kept under wraps, professional music criticism often only grants pop music the luxury of "significant context" in retrospect, and only insofar as it serves the purpose of establishing a myth; pop music that requires even a modicum of assembly before consumption still reads to most critics as incomplete, perhaps simply because the pressure to review albums immediately upon release codifies first takes as last words, leaves no room for said context to factor into an appraisal of an album's merit until it demonstrates some arbitrary level of "staying power," some level of social cache that can be mined. The idea that you might have to actually know something about a work before you engage with it -- even a work such as this, that explicitly reconsiders the original
Twin Fantasy's central conceit as much as it fleshes out its arrangements -- is anathema in such a climate. Robert Christgau's review of
Face to Face is particularly characteristic of this: he makes it clear that he has no idea whether or not the narrator's object of affection -- whose presence (or lack thereof) constitutes the entirety of the record's thematic arc -- is merely an "educational fabrication," and yet his appraisal remains positive, simply because such an identity is ultimately an extramusical contextual element that is unimportant in achieving what he assumes is the goal of "reminding young admirers [...] of their own existential confusions." That the subject is a real person whose identity is easily discovered, and that her involvement in the rerecording might point listeners towards an understanding of it that muddies that read completely, seems to matter only in the sense that it is, and can be redefined as, trivia, and even publications that present themselves as being tuned into the digital landscape (including a particularly plodding Pitchfork review) do little more than expound on the sentiment.
Knowing only of the record through these critical appraisals, one would walk away with the idea that
Face to Face works because its narrator is somehow intrinsically sympathetic, that its narrator's viewpoint intends to and successfully manages to mirror the listener's lived experience in such a way that it confirms the validity -- the poignancy -- of that shared experience, that the external factors that produced these songs and their place within the scope of Toledo's private life (to what extent their existence is even entertained) have no bearing on the validity of this success except perhaps to reinforce it such in a way that their inclusion would seem redundant. And in this sense,
Face to Face's existence as an album separate from its parent record begins to come into question, and in the absence of any convincing argument to the contrary -- Will Toledo being a perfectionist or Matador seeing a quick payday not withstanding -- it remains just another album about unrequited love, another paean to the confusion of youth, an album for you to listen to and see yourself in and feel unchallenged by that identification. It is much easier to read that way, of course, and that is the allure; divorcing this record from its context leaves only the possibility that Will Toledo is cosigning the bulk of the original record that remains, that the inclusion of those elements in modified form is not, in and of itself, a form of critique.
Christgau's review, after all, is a relatively accurate assessment of what
Twin Fantasy 2011 is and sets out to achieve; the narrator, read in the sympathetic light that was initially intended, utilizes his privileged position within the story to wield that sympathy as a sort of cloak, to hand-wave away accusations of manipulation and privacy invasion and justify strip-mining his object of affection and their life for his art. The very fact that the original
Twin Fantasy can be convincingly compared to a Yoni Wolf or a Rivers Cuomo album highlights its overarching failure: in presenting the narrator's plight as a tragedy, it reworks the complexities of a real-life relationship into a piece of art that does not bend like they do, that remains static when those complexities fray or transmogrify, that concludes neatly when the album ends instead of terminating at innumerable satisfying and unsatisfying endpoints. The aforementioned woman -- a trans cartoonist who was not yet out as such at the time -- eventually responded to her inclusion in that version of this album with a simple tweet: "indie boys are vampires. don't become a concept album."
It stands to reason then that her response to
Face to Face, had it really been nothing more than a gesture of perfectionism, would have been dismissive, if not outright hostile. But instead, she played an integral role in its very shape, creating the artwork included with the physical release and helping Toledo determine its omissions and inclusions, influencing what bits of it would eventually find their way into concerts and, incidentally, the amount of information about herself that would make it into public record. And that is because it differs so drastically from the original in intent that it exists as a separate entity unto itself, because it isn't the break up album
Twin Fantasy was, isn't an album about unrequited love, isn't an
Elephant Eyelash or a
Pinkerton. Critical outlets may be predominantly concerned with dicing up the lyrics into quotable tidbits for their readers, but this time around, they're not intended to be digested in that fashion, not intended to be sympathetic or relatable in and of themselves or in a way that even lends to the sort of "profound" versification expected of "literate" rock music -- they're not intended to allow for the prioritization of the sensibilities of listeners who happen to look, think, and feel like Will Toledo over the ones of someone who doesn't, not intended to posit the violations and transgressions of the narrator over the feelings and discomfort of its subject and, as a result, the honorific subjects of the listeners who consume break-up albums and twist them into justifications of, pictures of, deeper reflections on their own selfish misery. Their division as entities self-contained within "songs" represents only the limitations of the traditional rock album format, and when taken as intended, it becomes clear how each set of lyrics feeds into and references each other as though existing concurrently within a landscape, unified in form and intent.
And that intent is as easy to see as realizing that -- by the very nature of its context, the very nature of what rerecording an album like this based on input from its former subject implies --
Face to Face exists not as an attempt to rewrite the past but as an attempt at replicating the fluidity of a real relationship and the dynamics of its shape as it changes. And by doing such, Will Toledo ultimately winds up utilizing the form of the breakup album to make its negative xerox, to make as close as Indie Rock By White Guys is ever going to get to an album that attempts to negate the humiliating intent of and patriarchal dynamics that support the existence of that form. What Will Toledo has made is an album that celebrates the fluidity it mimics, that posits that relationships can change in healthy ways, that people who have one another's best interests at heart can refuse to let a lifetime of abuse and coercion from abusive structures be the primary influencing factor in the way the strands of their lives terminate, that abuse deserves to be called out, vanquished, that respect for another and a willingness to let their self-advocacy dictate the way you live alongside them can lead people to a place of greater understanding than what exists inside the dichotomies and binaries of lovers and friends, a place that strikes fear into the heart of racism, transphobia, homophobia, misogyny, classism, hate, abuse.
The fact that Toledo respected his subject's privacy enough (at least this go around) to give her the deciding vote in how the story she inspired was presented -- in how it was marketed and in how much of the ensuing press her name would be referenced in -- just proves that he's interested in living his personal life in adherence with that sentiment, even if it means his work is ultimately misinterpreted. And for that alone, he deserves applause; that the record turned out to be one of the best rock records of the 21st century is just icing on the cake.
