Toro y Moi – What For? (ALBUM REVIEW)

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adventureWeird_LP_11183_new28-year old South Carolina native, Chaz Bundick is a musician who likes to keep on the move. Over both his four-album career with Toro y Moi and his side projects, Les Sins and Sides of Chaz, Bundick has embraced an eclectic range of styles: funk, R&B, and psych-pop liberally mingling amongst the funky coolness of chillwave, a timed-out genre to which he has often been associated. His diversity and unpredictable nature is befitting of an artist who once told a Rolling Stone interviewer that he tends to become easily bored and stuck with certain musical traits and trends. So, it comes with little surprise that his latest Toro y Moi release, What For?, arrives as a bit of a musical mishmash with a full-band ensemble creating a joyous conglomeration of fuzzy guitar riffs, slinky funk shimmer, and hand-clapping soul. It’s a breezy listen-clocking in at a tad over 36 minutes-but one that elicits a fun, energetic response that keeps you rapidly moving along as you also play “spot the reference” to Bundick’s richly indebted musical homages.

The one revelation of this album may be the fondness Bundick seems to possess for the 1970’s. The production style plays that era’s vintage card heavily; it’s not difficult to imagine the home studio that housed the recording sessions decked out with shag carpeting, disco balls, and floral wallpapering. The spaced-out synthesizers that anchor tracks like “What You Want”, “Buffalo”, and “Ratcliff” come straight from the ELP and Wings playbooks, two of the era’s strongest progenitors of 70’s vibe. Elsewhere, “Lilly” and “Spell It Out” amp a strong disco ambiance that wouldn’t seem a bit out of place on a dance floor in 1979 or today in 2015. “Lilly” and another later album track, “Half Dome” also bear a sludgy resemblance to some of Tame Impala’s work, another band with a proud and boisterous affection for the madcap decadence of the 70’s landscape.

As much as the arrangements lift, lyrically though, the material sags. A song like, “Run Baby Run”, despite its’ catchy melody and sweeping harmonies, suffers under the burden of its’ lightweight wordplay. The lyrics read more like middle school yearbook mantras than the words of a seasoned artist of Bundick’s stature. “Empty Nesters” and “Yeah Right” are guilty of the same crime: sophisticated songcraft plagued by juvenile and trite words. It’s the kind of thing that could prevent Toro y Moi’s audience from growing along with them. There comes a time where this type of sentimentality (“Who are your new friends?/Why did you bring them?” and “Let’s hang out soon/I’ll give you a call”) wears thin and runs dry. He’s 28, not 18 anymore.
Bundick’s strength, both here and his back catalog, lies in his ability to seamlessly integrate classic sounds into the modern landscape. Already a deft producer and disc spinner, here he ably serves as a bandleader, too, as the instrumentation crunches, swings, and grooves with a lived-in precision that sounds natural and intuitive rather than tentative or contrived. The rock thing is a guise that could serve as Toro y Moi’s calling card. However, based on the track record, it just as easily could be a one-off endeavor that sends Bundick off into another round of muse-seeking exploration. Being the ambitiously creative seeker he is though, makes it unlikely that we will have to wait too long to find out where he is heading.

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