Album Review: Anything In Return by Toro Y Moi

We’ve been amused by his unique chillwave dreamy electronica sound since 2009, and more when we saw his performance last year at Laneway Festival, today along with Ra Ra Riot’s album released, this South Carolina recording artist and producer released his 3rd studio album, “Anything in Return”.

Who are they? Chaz Bundick better known as Toro y Moi, is a singer-songwriter, producer and talented artist who managed to bring music into many forms of chilwave could ever be. His first album “Causer of This” was released in 2010 under Carpark Records, which remak the beginning of the era of chilwave and synth-pop’s music alongside with Neon Indian, Ernest Green to the indie pop MGMT, and become ultimate summer compilation track that year. On the following year he released his second album “Underneath the Pine”, made him more famouse world wide and by then he also expand his music into more danceable indipop, which can be hear on his EP “Freaking Out”. With the sound of distorted keyboards, low end drum rolls, and weird shape shifting backsound, his songs mostly became Dj’s favourite track to be remixed. Chaz also has a side project focusing more on dance-style music called “Les Sins.”

So how’s this new album goes? It has been a while since his second album released, but I must say I’m glad that I can see his live performance before his 3rd album comes out, since this album is pretty much not as dancefull as his previous two. Well if we listen to “Harm Change” and “Studies” we can see a slightly different sound with previous album, which I think it’s good, so we doesn’t have to guess who sing this song, hence, he might want to make this album more mature, as he added more of house and 90s ambient electro pop sound. We can hear those kind of feeling in “Say That” and “So Many Details” and in “Rose Quartz” you can imagine yourself at the dark clubbing lounge in the 80s, with low glammy pop ambient sound. I like “Touch” though, mainly because it was a nice song with not so much of electronic sound, you know just a simple song that you use in the afternoon or when you want to have a piece of mind while reading a book or something. He put up some tempo in “Cola” , “High Living” and “How’s it Wrong” which somehow I think it’s a bit borring if you listen to it too much, I mean it’s nothing special here, not that ambient but not too upbeat, just flat. Another song I like in this album is probably “Never Matter” with some vocal samples on the back like some cheering from Michael Jackson or I don’t know some old afro dude shouting, but somehow make the song more fun. In general we can see that he use more of synths and vocal samples and add it here and there like psycedelic insturment sound like album. So, if you are more into low key elecetronic music kind of people and like to experiment more of the mixing sound, you probably like this album.