Toro y Moi – You And I

Tomorrow marks the official release of Boo Boo, the latest album from Toro Y Moi. In advance, the synthpop musician has shared the LP in full via a short film. Directed and produced by Company Studio, it follows Toro Y Moi as he’s driven around the beautiful Bay Area. Stream/watch it up above.

The follow-up to 2015’s What For? serves as his fifth to date and is said to be “the most personal work to date” for Chaz Bear (formerly Chaz Bundick). The intimate and revealing nature of the LP’s 12 tracks is the result of a confusing identity crisis, in which the synthpop musician found himself struggling to settle into life as a “famous” person.

“My dreams had become my reality, yet I was somehow unable to accept this new environment,” Bear explained in a press statement. “I felt as though I no longer knew what it was that I actually wanted and needed in and out of life, and at times I felt unable to even tell what was real.”

To help cope, Bear turned to music, and not just his own. He counts material from Daft Punk, Frank Ocean, and Oneohtrix Point Never as major influences on the new album.

Read the rest of this article at Consequence Of Sound

Matthew Dear sometimes has a hard time quieting his mind. The dance-rock innovator dropped partying when his daughters were born and took up an interest in mindfulness and meditation to feel more present. But when you’re a touring musician juggling several side projects (including his techno alias, Audion) and a constant case of jet lag, the crunchy stuff doesn’t always cut it — you want chemicals. On a particularly grueling tour stop in Australia, a friend offered him Modafinil, a drug used to treat narcolepsy. “First, I felt fantastic,” he tells NPR by phone from Ibiza, where he’s DJing a few parties. “But then, you come down.”

“Modafinil Blues” is a look inside the crash. Out on Ghostly International, the label Dear co-founded in 1999, the song is a patient, pulsing, goth-pop jewel that pulls the best elements of new wave — all the sex, melancholy and sly humor — and saunters off into the darkness. The song is paced like a haunted house, with scatterings of staccato synths, mysterious chirps and faint whispers echoing in the distance. Fantastically eerie and bizarre, they provide a perfect backdrop for Dear’s bluesy, groaning vocals, which are just flirty and soothing enough to keep you plugging along.

Read the rest of this article at NPR

• Juana Molina – Cosoco

The Argentine musician Juana Molina hasn’t released an album since Wed 21 came out back in 2013, but we can expect its follow up soon. Molina’s seventh LP, Halo, is due out in May, and its debut single “Cosoco” premiered this week. The song is a playful one that showcases the inventive instrumentation Molina’s known for. You can hear those inclinations best toward the end of this track, when Molina’s words give way to what sounds like the simulated hoot of an owl.

Read the rest of this article at Stereogum

Steve Lacy’s “Dark Red” starts in the pocket. A rawly recorded cymbal tapping opens the track, and it doesn’t venture too far from home, tight as heck across its under-three-minute running time. But man does he pack a lot in there when you listen closely. Which isn’t necessarily the best way to listen this new one from a member of the Internet gone solo. If you take an academic look at the works of Motown’s songwriting mega-geniuses Holland-Dozier-Holland, you’d find all kinds of subtleties: inventive uses of chains as percussion or soul destroying love notes. But if you let one of their Supremessingles pass through the FM dial, or let Lacy’s new track casually unspool on your Soundcloud feed, you get a great song, the barest thing a musician can deliver. Yes, there’s big beautiful strings, a funky bassline, and coos to rival the sweetest of doves. All the meticulousness, though, just serves to make one whole statement of heartbroken soul that sounds modern and new. That’s not so easy to do, but Lacy isn’t too bogged down with the details of invention that he forgets to make an excellent jam.

Read the rest of this article at Pitchfork

Read the rest of this article at Pitchfork