Album Review: Outer Peace by Toro y Moi

With Toro y Moi's last album, 2017's pleasant but often forgettable Boo Boo, it seemed possible that Chaz Bear was running out of new ways to make his habitually laid-back music register a pulse. He'd already spun his sound in seemingly every possible permutation, from lo-fi sampledelia to instrumental disco to guitar-crunched indie rock and back again. On Boo Boo, with tempos sagging like a wet paper bag, his production chops too often outstripped his songwriting abilities--a weakness that had dogged Bear (fka Chaz Bundick) since his debut.

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To an extent, the career of the South Carolinan musician has been defined by this distinction and whether deserved or not it has seen him give birth to a diverse and mixed discography in which constant experimentation has been the raison d'être. Enter Outer Peace, an album which feels like a homecoming of sorts, a return in which Chaz surfs along the synthwave aesthetic upon which he became renowned, but in which he illustrates his abilities to neatly perform to the expectations and conventions of several musical modes, namely funk, house, R&B and pop. On his thought process, Toro Y Moi has stated that "usually the peace is within, so to have peace on the outside is the challenge," broadly, the album reads as Chaz having reached this point of outward satisfaction.

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Chaz Bear never makes the same Toro y Moi record twice. He's spent a decade fine-tuning his chillwave sound, adding elements, refining, and discarding while making albums that constantly confound expectations and still deliver the songs and moods that make him a vital artist. After the narcotic, nocturnal R&B of Boo Boo, he seemingly immersed himself in Daft Punk and the DFA back catalog when putting songs together for his next record.

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Toro y Moi were at the forefront of the chillwave scene a few years back, alongside Neon Indian and Washed Out, although the man behind the music, Chaz Bear, rejected attempts to pigeonhole his musical offerings. Chillwave was something of a fairly nebulous 'microgenre' with poorly defined parameters but that's to be expected in the age of meme culture and soundbite knowledge. Regardless of his refusal to accept the label, Toro y Moi's output remains focused on those aspects of chillwave which make most sense in terms of forming a cohesive identity for a number of disparate musical acts - one eye on nostalgia, a summery feel and a pop sensibility.

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An intriguing and haphazard dive through history, this sixth album from the former chillwave don is fitfully inspired, but lacks a cohesive sonic identity Take a glance at social media right now, and everybody is sharing embarrassing old photos from a decade ago. A year defined by comically proportioned fringes, as we posed with bottles of Smirnoff Ice and puffed on soggy, poorly-rolled spliffs, 2009 was a huge year for chillwave, the dreamy bedroom pop genre coined by the blogosphere. The following year, Toro Y Moi's debut album 'Causers of This ' became synonymous with the sun-drenched sound - despite the fact that Chaz Bundick leans more towards icy hip-hop touchstones and tangled, studied layers of production than he does breezy, straight-up pop.

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Adapt or die, the saying goes. But there's no real caveat to that, no timespan to the demand, and it's blatantly something Chaz Bear keeps in mind. His seventh album as Toro Y Moi finds him tweaking and fine tuning his sound. Those cutely thin vocals only occasionally get the vocoder-esque treatment, and his woozy, summertime production remains rampant across the album's ten tracks.

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I t's 10 years since the dawn of chillwave, the music scene that looked at synthpop, soft rock, reggae and more through a rose-tinted kaleidoscope while contemplating the day's first craft IPA. Was its supremely unbothered demeanour the product of a time of relative harmony, or the only reasonable reaction to a banking crisis and recession: a music that turned from a future on fire to the softer warmth of the past? Anyway, the Brooklyn hipster culture that birthed it became the mainstream, most of the scene's players presumably got bored and started cold-brew coffee startups, and the world got steadily worse. Chaz Bundick, AKA Toro Y Moi, therefore can't go on making hazy jams like it's 2009 and we're all still in the Obama honeymoon period, and following some middling records, his seventh is his strongest in years: funky, focused and rooted in the present.

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Assume Form by James Blake: love songs from the cold. (Polydor) Hushed, expressive vocal performances have become increasingly key to James Blake’s art, just as his signature sound, his cold, sculptural minimalism, has become rote in the time of Drake. Assume Form, despite the handsome ghost-of-a-smile on the LP sleeve, doesn’t introduce a more colorful palette for Blake.

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