Album Of The Week: Toro Y Moi Anything In Return

Toro Y Moi was once associated with the electronic pop subgenre and short cultural moment known as chillwave. There. That's done. As far as I'm concerned -- and I seem to be the only critic who thinks this -- Chaz Bundick's name and the c-word never need to appear in the same sentence again. Everyone who started to build a career from that initial moment has grown and evolved and moved on, but none have put more distance between them and their press-anointed inception than Bundick. On Underneath The Pines a couple of years ago, he was already pushing toward a squelchy, psychedelic sort of soul-pop, a one-man genre built from stray moments on old Stevie Wonder albums. And even at first, he had more Dilla than Ariel Pink in him. But Anything In Return is the moment where Bundick has broken away completely and built something resembling a concrete persona, developing a matter-of-fact disco-pop slickness that sounds way sharper and more defined than anything he's done before. His music doesn't sound like he recorded it in an amniotic gloop-chamber, and it doesn't evoke lost memories of watching Superhuman Samurai Cyber Squad. Instead, it's exceedingly well-realized studio-pop music, music with all its moving parts in place. And in the exceedingly small category of "dorked-out but somehow effortlessly smooth half-black/half-Filipino soul-pop singer/producers beloved of Tyler, The Creator" the Bundick of Anything In Return has come to rival circa-2002 Pharrell. That's a pretty staggering achievement, all told.