Album Review: Toro Y Moi - Anything In Return

Being associated with a particular scene can do great things for your career – for about five minutes. Sure, your profile gets a boost as you score points on Metacritic and grab column inches as you ride a wave of fashionability, until you get sucked into the smelly vortex of rejection, inspiring comments such as, 'You don't still listen to them? They're grunge/electroclash/Japanese doom sludge' (delete as applicable).

It's often saddest when this curse befalls innovators such as Chaz 'Toro Y Moi' Bundick, who had no idea that the format he'd developed since 2001 would end up spearheading the ubiquitous chillwave movement. Having warned that Anything In Return would be a pop album, Bundick has taken mini-steps away from the sound he made a pioneering contribution to. The production as a whole sounds crisper, less 'bedroom studio'-resembling than before, but it's still faithful to the spirit of his earlier work. On Say That in particular, the synthesisers and house-y female backing “ooohs” are kept discreetly low so that the main vocal, despite being soft and understated, still takes centre stage. Although his sound has been given a scrub, the chilled out vibes remain intact. Tracks like Cola barely raise a pulse – in an invitingly comatose way – while his lyrics still seem to be 90-plus per cent preoccupied with girls.

Some of Bundick's most vibrant material is here; the opening Harm In Charge, Say That and lead single So Many Details, which aches longing and pulsates sunshine simultaneously. Let's hope the wind fashion sticks with him a little longer.