Toro Y Moi - The tailor of chill-wave

While critics are busy figuring out what hypnagogic pop actually is, armed with neurological dictionaries, some guy - probably bearded and wearing skinny jeans! - from Hipster Runoff rounds up a handful of "similarly inclined" bands on his blog and slaps on them the generic label of chill-wave (also known as glo-fi). Some disapprove, some criticize, some want nothing to do with it, but the term sticks regardless. The sound being outlined is traced back - somewhat forcibly - to the low-fidelity collage attitude of Ariel Pink, the hazy electronic atmospheres of Boards Of Canada, and the freewheeling psychedelia of Animal Collective and solo escapee Panda Bear, but in truth the whole thing slips past any neat definition, since it's not really a genre as such - there are no key stylistic markers, and it doesn't even have a fixed geographic home (other than the web, that is).

There is, however, a vague common thread to be found: the use of old, worn-out synths tuned to eighties mode, scrappy guitars, hazy rhythms wavering between power-pop and funk-r&b, and voices on the verge of sampledelia, recorded as if through an intercom, embroidering evanescent melodies. Not only that - to round off the picture, the newborn non-movement also finds expression in an almost shared visual imagery, specifically in musicians' and fans' mania for plastering the web with pastel colors faded by the sun like old photographs with grainy pixels, a style that - wouldn't you know it - goes hand in hand with the creation of a smartphone app that instantly produces fake polaroids with built-in vintage patina, perfect for the Instagram generation. In short, there's really everything you could possibly criticize about this messy new millennium, caught between third-person retromania(c) recycling and hipster-ism gone wild, but the evocative charm remains undeniable nonetheless.

The fact remains that the various acts unwittingly gathered under the chill-wave umbrella follow their own personal instincts, and some of them want nothing to do with the label at all. Which is, of course, understandable; it doesn't take much to realize that the flashes of youth painted by Washed Out aren't exactly on the same wavelength as the darkwave intimacy of Nite Jewel and Chet Faker, while a true soundscaper like Tycho keeps his distance from the eighties explorations of Neon Indian and the disco sheen of Com Truise, or again, Yppah's vaguely indie-rock setup sounds nothing like the r&b punctuations of L.A.'s TOKiMONSTA or the lysergic assemblages of Memory Tapes, and so on.

Of the whole bunch, Toro Y Moi is certainly the one with the most jangly leanings and dancefloor-oriented explorations, but at the same time also the most power-pop and the most eager to venture beyond the boundaries. As with most of the rest of the pack, his style shows a few limitations right from the start - most notably the flimsy song structures and a somewhat flat little voice - to the point that, without emotional tension, there's always a risk of sliding into elevator-music background noise. Yet when the balance works, Toro's artistry draws the listener into his own sonic world, into a muffled bliss where everything seems possible, cool, and oh so beautiful. Just like the leitmotif of the movement he's associated with, Toro's work presents itself to our ears as a ring shattered into hundreds of colors flung into the ether in search of the everlasting ecstasy of youth. The format is entirely beside the point, whether it's an album, EP, mixtape, 7", remix, or DJ set (though this profile focuses on the albums and EPs).

But Chaz's trajectory is also the most atypical of the whole scene; starting out at just twenty, writing cheerful power-pop sketches with "real" instruments like guitar and drums, Toro has gradually steeped his sound in electronics, arriving at the full-on chill-wave of his first official albums released under the Carpark label. Yet he then curiously found himself, between 2014 and 2015, reabsorbing the electro component of his sound through the alias Les Sins, before heading back down pop/rock paths once again as Toro Y Moi with the disorienting album What For?. One eye on style, one on the keyboard, and one on the guitars: the guy knows what he's doing.

Chill with me

Columbia, South Carolina; Chaz Bradley Bundick, born 1986, is the typical kid from a mid-sized town on the gentle fringes of America, studying graphic design and playing in a student band with his classmates. Among his closest friends is Ernest Greene – better known as Washed Out – with whom he builds a relationship rooted heavily in musical exchange, forming one of the few real nuclei from which this non-movement known as chill-wave can be said to originate. But in those years Chaz has a thoroughly autistic, DIY approach, relying on the typical guitar/drums/bass setup to give shape to fragments of thoughts and words that make up his disjointed – if charmingly innocent – compositions. The reclaiming of the past is thus absorbed through random listens to old vinyl from the Seventies and Eighties, then reworked through an indie lens that turns the humble into a genuine aesthetic. The very choice of a disjointedly polyglot, French/Spanish stage name like Toro Y Moi seems to almost play with a sense of not-belonging, or at most to underline, with post-modern irony, the mixed blood running through his DNA, since Chaz is the son of a Filipino mother and an African-American father, though neither culture seems to dominate his art.

If anything, his very first cry, Woodlands (2007), is a demo album made up of breezy, youthfully carefree acoustic sketches, thoroughly American to the bone, a homemade product devoted to messing around in his bedroom between math homework and messaging the cute girl from class 4C on Facebook. The listen moves between the folk of the title track "Woodlands" and the gentle arpeggios of "New Loved Ones", joyfully lo-fi moments ("Ektelon"), fun power-pop detours ("Carolinas", "Girl Problems"), and a "Can't Hold This Stance" that, between tapped-out piano and tipsy backing vocals, almost sounds like a britpop track in the vein of Supergrass.

Woodlands was never officially pressed and can only be found in digital form, but it's a pleasure to listen to because, in its instinctive simplicity and melodic honesty, it already lays out the entire poetics of the Toro Y Moi persona: carefree ease and summer breeze as the backdrop to a barbecue set up on a rooftop in the middle of downtown.

Things start to take shape with the second collection, My Touch (2009), another demo album never officially pressed and seemingly intended for no one in particular, which has nonetheless become, over time, a touchstone for his fans (and probably for chill-wave as a whole). Things do in fact get a lot more interesting; setting aside traditional instruments, Chaz officially discovers the synthesizer and the myriad possibilities it opens up for him. So the old indie-guitar sketches of the past turn into electronic carousels and psychedelic round dances ("Deep Routes", the excellent "Such Bad Handlings" and "Bend Your Body"), near-dancefloor moments like the blasts of the interlude "Existance Music", the synth-pop with background accordion of "Master Of None" (a sped-up cover of the famous Beach House track), the cool posturing of "Lesson 223", and even the curious videogame-flavored electronic particles of "Take This". Toro, in short, is starting to have fun, fiddling with the black-and-white keys and turning the knobs to blur the sound into echoes and reverb at will. It sounds like a contradiction, but by fading the formula, My Touch paradoxically takes on a sharper identity. It may still be in embryonic form, but you can already feel the full "touch".

His entry into the pantheon of the web happens, of course, in the most shamelessly hipster way possible: the release – through Mirror Universe Tapes – of a cassette limited to 100 copies, Body Angles (2009). Toro has completely lost the plot. The more than 9 minutes of the instrumental "Night Body" – between inlays of Indian guitar, psychedelic torpor, and continual harmonic slides into total abstraction – mark his official entry into the world of dreams: abandon reason, all ye who enter here, and let yourselves be ensnared by the sonic weave of this chaotic extra-sensory journey to the outer limits of what the word "chill" actually means. Wherever the ear lands, it finds extremely low-fidelity guitars, as in the rediscovered Velvet-esque rock'n'roll of "Do The Stuff", its vocal barely audible beneath the clatter, or the inconclusive interlude "Can I Know", which sounds like little more than congealed noise. And yet, out of nowhere, comes the stratospheric, muffled beat of the only "song" on the record, "Time Pleasure", which is instantly a small classic in Toro's catalogue.

None of it makes sense, in short – what the fuck? as the Americans say – Body Angles is without a doubt the most misleading calling card in history, a genuine piece of hipster indulgence that nonetheless manages, remarkably, to retain its charm through the murk. It could easily have ended there, but luckily for Chaz, Mirror Universe Tapes has a solid little following of its own, and the novelty of the cassette format catches the eye of those most attuned to "new things" (!), who start passing his name around from one digital platform to another. The invitation to join the Carpark roster – the New York-born independent label – is by now imminent. Body Angles is still worth a listen, ideally in digital form, since original cassette copies change hands for no small sums (not to mention the hassle of digging the equipment out of the attic just to play one).

Curiously, though, before his official debut arrived, Chaz found time to put out one last self-produced effort online, a 7-track EP released under the alias Sides Of Chaz and sold as a promo item at the Caribou shows he was opening for around that time. The brief liner note printed on the back of the sleeve reads, word for word: "These songs were my first attempts at recording songs as an experiment without planning or writing anything ahead of time. Some are weird, others sound good. These songs changed the way I write music forever. Enjoy – Chaz".

Sides Of Chaz (2010) thus presents itself as a collection of highly uncoordinated, free-form sketches that leave total room for atmosphere, in a kind of lysergic dream with no fixed reference points. The truth, though, is that, fetish object or not, Sides Of Chaz really leaves far too much to chance to be taken seriously, not so much for its lack of form as for the absence of that spark of grit that had made the disorienting little cassette Body Angles a fascinating episode after all. Still, whoever owns one of the extremely rare copies of Sides Of Chaz should hold onto it dearly.

Carparked

None of this changes the fact that the internet era is naturally awash in hype, subgenres and next big things, to the point that many harbor doubts about the longevity and actual substance of the phenomenon in question. In a climate like that, the label debut of the already much-discussed Toro Y Moi obviously plunges headfirst into the fray. But Chaz knows how to play his eleven aces with the confidence of a composer already thoroughly at home with synths. Causers Of This (2010) reclaims, stretches and expands his still-recent past toward new shores, definitively coining its aesthetic; it's hypnagogic pop, glo-fi, chill-wave, rascally nostalgia and whatever else you want to call it.

Picture a shellac castle whose floors are connected by pop-tronic staircases, held together (so to speak) by a soft, floating groove. A modern jukebox, dominated by dreamy electronic arrangements and Valium-dosed rhythmic fluorescence (the fine single "Blessa"), in which synthetic rarefaction reigns supreme ("Minors").

The gambit really pays off: Causers Of This comes across as carefully crafted, able to project, with a thoroughly contemporary attitude, sonic memory toward everything that abounded in the wonderful Eighties, favoring its more hallucinated, adolescent side in certain respects ("Thanks Vision"). Toro Y Moi thus blends rhythm, lo-fi, retro research and hypnagogic escapism into a harmonious experience well worth sharing without hesitation, earning all the respect and considerable attention that duly followed. The wheel is set in motion, the debut gains traction, not so much on the charts (obviously) as on the lips of genre experts and more discerning listeners. Among the exponents of so-called chill-wave, the name Toro Y Moi becomes everyday currency.

Barely a year passes before Chaz resurfaces on the independent market, already showing new colors and ready to follow new trends. For Underneath The Pine (2011), Chaz rouses his Toro from slumber with an injection of strictly eighties sounds, made to vibrate gracefully in a decidedly funkier groove. And so in Underneath The Pine the Valium-laced chilly fluorescence of the excellent debut becomes merely a convenient pretext for adding new shades and sections. This time, Bundick aims to sweeten the mix with grandly played soulful inserts and instrumental calm bordering on telenovela kitsch ("Divina"). Every single track on this second album shows off a sonic patina that is only impalpable in appearance, but which makes the whole affair even more dreamlike. After all, you only need to lend your ears to acoustic ballads of the caliber of "Before I'm Done" to pick up on a new direction. In essence, Carpark's new talent moves further away from his own era, projecting himself headlong into an imagined world he never personally lived through (given his age), intent on making it a stable home for his musical perceptions.

The result is thrilling at several points, but it does place limits on the potential shown previously. Because on Underneath The Pine Toro wades with a certain ease into disco music with a more cheerful soul flavor ("New Beat"), plays with the colors of his keys, chases rainbows, but also stumbles into some pointless saccharine moments ("How I Know"), frankly superfluous, in a fragile, mischievous back-and-forth between well-played aces and avoidable gambles. But tucked away in the background, the carefree ease of "Still Sound" only serves to remind us that, all things considered, Chaz is still just a kid – and honestly, that's just fine.

Instead, confirming his glowing twenty-five years, the South Carolina boy promptly returns the same year in great shape, seemingly knowing no rest. A tireless manipulator and increasingly meticulous sampler of eighties sounds and moods, the EP Freaking Out (2011) further refines his sultry microcosm, dotted with soft chilly collisions and breezy synth-pop flourishes, depicting an imaginative world that nonetheless remains forever diverted toward sunny beaches and melancholy tides. Beefed-up funky bass, an irresistible synth, and off goes "All Alone" in a succession of electric twirls and synthetic hula-hoop spins. "Freaking Out" picks up the baton and lights up new colours, giving the impression of spinning on a little carousel at the edge of the beach; "Sweet", meanwhile, speeds up and reveals entirely unexpected scenarios, with Chaz remixing himself in an incredible retro-futurist drumming pattern.

The tones also become decidedly softer, though no less captivating, outlining instead an ecstatic crescendo like that of "Saturday Love" (a reworking of an old Cherelle soul track). But the true apotheosis lies entirely in "I Can Get Love": a four-on-the-floor kick, liquid pulses, classy stop&go moves, and the dancing begins. Bundick shifts into top gear and outdoes everyone.

Unfortunately, for now Freaking Out remains just a splendid isolated case, but one that synthesizes and expands the concept of chill-wave toward new heights without forgetting the importance of keeping the dream enjoyable, which should never run too long. A concise, perfect EP, to be savoured with eyes closed as an ideal escape from the icy winter and grey everyday life.

By now Toro Y Moi's name is everywhere and on everyone's lips as Carpark's new star, to the point that the first compilation, June 2009 (2012), promptly arrives. Obviously this isn't a best of, but rather a series of old tracks (re)recorded in June 2009, during a particularly prolific period that was of great personal importance to the artist's musical development — a genuine "moment in time" captured on record, so to speak, which is, after all, what chill-wave has always set out to do. So we find old acquaintances from the Woodlands era such as "Ektelon", "Girls Problems" and "Dead Pontoon", as well as the first draft of "Talamak" (from Causers Of This). Overall, the album is a collection of lo-fi tracks with minimal electronic inlays and the odd nostalgic languor ("Warm Frames"). Who knows, maybe June 2009 could have been a proper album, perhaps even the actual debut of the Toro Y Moi project, but all things considered it's probably for the best that events unfolded as we know them. Stylistically "behind" both My Touch and Causers Of This, the semi-compilation June 2009 is really more of a curiosity for aficionados, or perhaps for those who want to explore the sound of early, guitar-driven Toro Y Moi without having to hunt down and download old demos that were never officially released. Certainly, though, by 2012 June 2009 already sounds anachronistic compared to what's happening both in Chaz's career and in the rest of the chill-wave microcosm.

Toward new frontiers: pop, the dancefloor, the future and a return to the past

However fragmented his style, and however thoroughly chaotic the way he dumps anything he's recorded online, creating an endless jungle of material (impossible to catalogue in an article like this one), Chaz Bundick always has clear ideas when it comes to making a proper album. With his third record in just two years, Anything In Return (2013) aims definitively at pop and at a sonic blend whose ingredients seem never to run out. If on the previous Underneath The Pine the shift was only sketched out, and the paths trodden decidedly funkier, this time good old Chaz properly tidies up every drawer of his coffee table, improving the production and giving the songs' structure greater melodic punch and less hypnagogic sprawl. Although the instrumentation remains virtually unchanged, between eighties keyboards and whatnot, Toro seems to have found a new balance, combining with notable nonchalance the synthetic escapism of the debut and the synth-pop indulgences of the excellent EP Freaking Out, without however giving up the underlying softness that has marked his style from the very start ("Touch").

Anything In Return thus presents itself as a modestly ambitious work, carefully crafted in every single nuance. It's the classic album of maturity, confirmation of a talent blossoming in all its splendour. Several standout moments take shape within it, from the Eastern-tinged flourishes of "Studies" to the soft, vaguely dreamy groove of "Harm In Change" complete with a lounge breakdown in the background, through the liquid, disorienting pulses of "Grown Up Calls" all the way to the tender, charming stride of "Day One". What distinguishes Toro Y Moi's music today is the remarkable ability to create a world of its own, made of soul reminiscences, funky arpeggios, chill-wave blasts and distant exotic escapes. A grand-scale return with plenty, plenty of class to spare.

But it's long been well known that good old Chaz Bundick also likes to tinker with the console. The Les Sins project thus represents this shy South Carolina boy's ultimate electronic escape. A parallel attitude already highlighted on the previous 12" "Lina" (2010), within which new rhythmic branches were introduced with a mood certainly more accessible than those usually found in his dreamier reference model. On this first LP under that moniker, simply titled Michael (2014), unexpected and at times cloying lounge textures take over ("Bellow"), along with melodic interlocks with a neo-soul flavour ("Why", featuring Nate Salman), bold synthetic flourishes ("Toy") and, here and there, toy-like keyboard washes that are, unfortunately, strikingly flimsy in their pseudo-exotic daydreaming.

The results are certainly not among his best, and good old Chaz repeatedly seems to lack the bite that such territory demands. Likewise, the hypnagogic escapism of his early days, as disorienting as it was soothing, is definitively set aside in favour of an electronic recipe devoid of identity.

It's as if Les Sins had suddenly lost his way, turning by pure chance down the first lit side street, and ending up mistaking a dim light for an amusing musical shortcut through which to explore new production urges. In short, in this first outing as Les Sins, Chaz ends up, without much ceremony, in the most impassable of dead ends, thereby partly dashing the perfectly reasonable expectations placed on him. Michael is a minor stumble along the way that we forgive without a second thought, given the quality of his main path.

But Chaz doesn't stop there; despite the not exactly thrilling results under the Les Sins name, within a few months he already has yet another Toro Y Moi album ready — What For? (2015) — honestly starting to shake that notion of authenticity that had made chill-wave as colourful as it was fleeting a phenomenon. And yet this time Chaz makes a turn truly no one expected: he sets the computer aside and embraces indie rock, creating an album played live from start to finish, with drums, electric guitar riffs and feedback, even a touch of piano. Sure, the song structures remain frayed as usual, as does that little voice that never really changes tone and keeps everything eternally sunny and breezy, but with repeated listens tracks like "The Flight" and "Empty Nesters" rise up again, revealing a richness of sound that's anything but trivial (who's playing guitar there, Frusciante?).

The same goes for the opening "What You Want?", amid Beatles-esque echoes, dreamy little turns and a sudden electric distortion signalling new possible stylistic mixes. The following "Buffalo" gracefully returns to soulful suggestions worthy of late Motown catalogue, the lo-fi-flavoured piano moods of "Ratacliff" immerse the listener in the usual hazy, dreamy climax, while the soft vocoderised echoes of "Lilly" lead into a melodic spiral that's at times atonal.

Beneath the surface, Toro proves to be a musician certainly aware of his own abilities, who still loves to tinker with the past (take, as a supreme example, the funky little turn of "Spell It Out"), but without ever losing sight of the horizon, at times even plugging in at just the right moment, between serenades drunk on happiness ("Run Baby Run") and genuine folk-flavoured ballads that are certainly more immediate, especially when compared to his past, purely chilly harmonic constructs (the closing "Yeah Right").

And with this sort of "homecoming", for now we too shall stop here. Chill-wave has had its day; by 2015, What For? is, all things considered, a somewhat fluffy, self-referential album, deliberately careless in its drift and in its own way elusive, but it's Toro himself — the sly fox — who asks the question before we can: what for? For nothing, exactly. But Chaz's art continues to colour the airwaves with pastel sketches that are certainly not essential, but more enjoyable than ever.

Samantha (2015) is yet another sidestep; a mixtape released as a surprise and downloadable for free via Dropbox. Electro-r&b moments, hints of abstract hip-hop, light ambient-tinged drones and the wildest kind of sampledelia give life to 50 minutes of highly personal homespun digressions, clearly cooked up by an omnivore of the Web and intended for the Web's omnivorous public. A listen best suited to background use, given the overly fragmented way the tracks have been assembled and cut, though the project isn't without a certain charm (and on "Enough Of You" the acclaimed Nosaj Thing makes an appearance).

Toward the future: deserts, impro-jazz, psychedelia & the return of funk

At first glance, the arrival of Live From Trona (2016) seems like a pretty great idea. The cover art is stunning, since the chosen location is a striking slice of the Trona desert in California. Toro and his crew set up a stage in the middle of a rocky, alien landscape, and the line-up — enriched by the presence of the identical twin jazz musicians The Mattson 2 — seems poised to deliver a show on the edge of lysergic perception.

But soon the flip side of the matter arrives. Live From Trona isn't really a proper concert, since it's missing the main ingredient: an audience. The whole show was in fact conceived by Chaz almost as a personal indulgence, a day trip out of town with the band he's been touring the United States with in support of his latest album. There are no tickets to buy, in other words, and the lack of an audience unfortunately results in an absence of energy that the songs alone can't make up for. With the recording a bit too clean (and the silence of the desert all around), the result is a live, direct-feed version of some songs from the more recent albums, well played but lacking the spark that usually helps live records make sense of their own existence.

Pic or it didn't happen, goes the Web's unshakeable mantra. Toro Y Moi, beyond the pic, even made a film and a double vinyl to prove the experience really happened, and watching the visual companion piece always has its effect. But we're still left with a bitter taste for not even being invited.

Right at the moment when the overused 80s revival seems to have faded a bit (a revival that Chaz himself plundered extensively back in the days of mini-classics like Causers Of This and Freaking Out), it might soon be the turn of the 70s — if by 70s we mean lysergic psychedelia, California surfin', blacksploitation (see the recent work of people like Adrian Younge and Childish Gambino) and an overused and stereotyped but still evocative set of imagery somewhere between Tarantino and the Coen brothers. All present and correct as retromania demands, in other words: nothing new, but all neatly packaged up for the delight of the postmodern consumer caught in a moment of nostalgia.

This time officially alongside Jared (guitar) and Jonathan (drums) Mattson comes Star Stuff (2017), the natural continuation of the way both parties, deep down, love to conjure deconstructivist little scenes with a few simple strokes: the twins through the use of effects-laden instrumentation, Chaz with software, knob-twiddled textures and the slenderest of vocal lines. The resulting mix offers an engaging, organic sound that arrives already road-tested, though that's exactly what you'd expect from Chaz's work by now.

What doesn't change is the way Star Stuff too moves forward on a bittersweet see-saw of small emotions and moments of distraction. It opens with the undeniably evocative "Sonmoi", which rides through the scent of exotic spices and makes the guitar appear and disappear through a thousand different effects, then pauses on the brief and incongruous almost-funk sketch of "Steve Pink", before wobbling from the ancient keyboards of "A Search" to the spacious 8 minutes of "Don't Blame Yourself", where the drums take over through joyful rhythm changes, while the slightly darker "Cascade" closes the record with hints of something almost space-western.

You certainly can't demand a solid structure from the jam-session formula, fair enough — Chaz and the Mattson 2 have full freedom of expression here, and the way they range across rhythms and harmonies creates genuinely evocative landscapes. But, at least on a studio album, leaning more on vocal interpretation, or adopting a more muscular sound in certain stretches, would surely have helped craft something truly memorable rather than just pleasant on first impact.

Chaz — forever the pointillist in a world of broad brushstrokes — once again prefers to take refuge in his world of dreams, odd ideas and little sketches, always one step away from self-indulgence. Atmosphere versus form and substance, good-natured little tricks versus serious, sweated-over technique, brushstrokes of feeling versus fully formed statements: out there a constant battle rages on, one that Chaz Bundick's elusive music keeps taking part in with real nonchalance, whether he's making jazz, chill-wave, indie-rock or electro-house under the name Les Sins. But in the end, how much of this really matters the moment the year's first real sun finally comes out?

With these psych-jazz digressions set aside, Bundick returns to the guise of Toro Y Moi, delivering a comeback with a playful title: Boo Boo. Accompanying the album's release is a short film in which Chaz himself appears driving a van on a day of blazing sunshine, as the various tracks roll by one after another, with shot changes achieved simply by cutting from one back window to the other, and overlapping frames superimposed on the main shot showing him immersed in his keyboards, in his studio, in his own little world. At one point in the video a caption also appears reading "Reality's tight if the music is right", posted last year by Californian chill-wave musician GORV on his Twitter profile.

Right from the opening notes of "Mirage" a kind of mirage takes shape, one in which good old Toro Y Moi pours his satisfying and self-satisfied combinatory art, entirely devoted to fishing out blazing-hot pop solutions and the dreamy rhythms of the aforementioned 80s. Even though we're faced with a well-known operation, one Bundick himself has already extensively formulated since his earliest days, this time everything appears far less blurry while also suspended in a kind of magical melodic and production balance. The starting intention remains to lead the listener toward some unspecified Californian beach, often toward some atoll tucked away in our own personal drawer of memory; a non-place in its own way untouched by the fleetingness and greyness of the present, where for a few moments one can relive the bliss and carefree spirit of those years.

So "No Show" and "Pavement" glide past one after another, tracks in which hypnagogic melancholy anesthetizes both soul and eardrums, acting as peripheral connective tissue to the concise, compelling progression of "Mona Lisa", one of the few songs on the record that grab you from the very first listen; one of the album's potential singles, alongside the hazy, dark "Don't Try" and the lulling, ecstatic suspensions of "Windows".

Boo Boo gives us a thoroughly inspired Toro Y Moi, ever more faithful to his own path. A path that many keep chasing with spectacular delay, that many will ride to the top of charts the world over, but one that few can boast of having reached and grasped with the "pristine" and gentle timing and manner of good old Chaz.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite Sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and the latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google