Toro Y Moi - Sandhills. EP [Ltd. Ed. Black Vinyl w. Etched B-Side]

Toro Y Moi - Sandhills. EP [Ltd. Ed. Black Vinyl w. Etched B-Side] 

[Black Engraved Vinyl, LPs include custom etching of album lyrics, B-side features field recordings].

Toro y Moi’s ‘Sandhills’ is both a tender love letter to Chaz Bear’s hometown of Columbia, South Carolina, and a poignant, bittersweet acceptance that one can never really go back home. Recalling Sufjan’s ‘Seven Swans’ or Karen O’s soundtrack work for ‘Where The Wild Things Are,’ these loping folk-pop songs are themselves a sort of Saturn return, reminiscent of Bear's first handmade CD-Rs as Toro y Moi. Bear gave them out to friends in the earliest days of the moniker, the releases stuffed in the Case Logic visor of their cars, and each listen brings a little more of that detail to life: the mall after which 'Sandhills' is named; the teenaged friends spending aimless hours there, full of big ennui and bigger dreams; the late-capitalist decline and empty big box stores of Sandhills today.

Chaz Bear, Toro y Moi, is now a globally beloved indie-pop icon. But 'Sandhills', with its banjo and lap steel flourishes and its wide-eyes wonder, concedes that you never quite totally rid yourself of those adolescent blues. You might just, if you're lucky, develop better mechanisms (or delusions!) with which to handle them. "Sidelines" tells the tale of aesthete putting himself through the high school football gauntlet. Even the closing novelty track “Said Goodbye To Rock n Roll” has all the makings of a Chris Stapleton hit if you just squint a little. Clear eyes, full hearts, sweet jams, can’t lose. Lyrically deft and deceptively heartbreaking, ‘Sandhills’ may be a brief pit stop between grand statements from Bear, but it’s brimming with rust, guts, big moods and love. 

Track Listing

1. Back Then 
2. Sidelines 
3. Sandhills 
4. The View 
5. Said Goodbye to Rock n Roll 

Toro y Moi’s seventh studio album, ‘MAHAL’, is the boldest and most fascinating journey yet from musical mastermind Chaz Bear. The record spans genre and sound - encompassing the shaggy psychedelic rock of the 1960s and ‘70s, and the airy sounds of 1990s mod-postrock - taking listeners on an auditory expedition, as if they’re riding in the back of Bear’s Filipino Jeepney that adorns the album’s cover. But ‘MAHAL’ is also an unmistakably Toro y Moi experience, calling back to previous works while charting a new path forward in a way that only Bear can do.
 
‘MAHAL’ is the latest in an accomplished career for Bear, who’s undoubtedly one of the decade’s most influential musicians. Since the release of the electronic pop landmark ‘Causers of This’ in 2009, subsequent records as Toro y Moi have repeatedly shifted the idea of what his sound can be. But there’s little in Bear’s catalogue that will prepare you for the deep-groove excursions on ‘MAHAL’, his most eclectic record to date.
 
TRACKLISTING:
1. The Medium
2. Goes By So Fast
3. Magazine (feat. Salami Rose Joe Louis)
4. Postman
5. The Loop
6. Last Year
7. Mississippi
8. Clarity (feat. Sofie)
9. Foreplay
10. Déjà Vu
11. Way Too Hot
12. Millennium (feat. The Mattson 2)
13. Days In Love