Toro Y Moi – Freak Love

The Car Park imprint maintains its impeccable run of form with the fractal sonic geometry of Toro Y Moi’s debut album ‘Causers Of This’. It’s no overstatement to say that some of the most interesting music bubbling up from the underground right now features a healthy element of 80′s generic composting, with artists like Panda Bear and Animal Collective, Nite Jewel and the IDIB lot, or the multifarious manifestations of James Ferraro (Ducktails, Skaters etc) all blooming glorious hybrid flowers from the detritus of a decade’s MoR exuberance. Toro Y Moi is a vital new addition to this list of culture-saturated alchemists, filtering various shades of shimmering yacht-pop tones and boogie disco vibes with the acutely adroit EQ’ing of a Theo Parrish mix or the subtle textural disturbance of 20 years of dirt found on the surface grooves of a charity shop vinyl find. Through his editing processes, Toro Y Moi releases the musty odour of damp cardboard sleeves drawn from hundreds of strangers bedrooms, their fragrances, both narcotic, synthetically floral and unmistakably human, flooding back sonic memories with an intoxicating synaesthetic flush. But while the effect may be similar to Ferraro’s psyched dreams, the production levels are definitely not lo-fi, craftily using the kind of compression techniques as the Thriller dudes or Dilla on ‘Fax Shadows’, and achieving the future-vintage heat-haze of Lone’s ‘Lemurian’ set on ‘Thanks Vision’ or ‘Freak Love’ to bely a proper laptop expertise. In this dreamy unter-pop interzone ‘Talamak’ and ‘You Hid’ are international anthems that would make Daft Punk or Phoenix jealous and the title track is where Axel Willner should have brought Hall & Oates into The Field after ‘From Here We Go Sublime’. This is an album bursting with pop potential on the same scale as Panda Bear, and upon initial listens, hits the same emotive chi-spots as Arthur Russell, which is always an instinct that you should pay heed to in our experience. So far, one of the albums of 2010 no question.

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Lyrics

Sorry if I don’t have faith in you
and all the boys you have living with your cultured ways.
Sorry if I don’t have faith in you,
seems like you had a fail in love – now the love’s gonna let you go.
I’m not sure if I’d go there.
I don’t believe in free love.  

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