Toro Y Moi - 'June 2009'

Toro Y Moi
June 2009

Carpark, 2012

• favorites:

  "Dead Pontoon," "Take the L to Leave"

• flavors:

  Dryer Sheets, Sand Art

RATING:

TRACK LIST:

• Best Around
• Take the L to Leave
• Girl Problems
• Dead Pontoon
• Ektelon
• Drive South
• Sad Sounds
• Talamak
• Warm Frames
• New Loved Ones

There comes a point in most artists' careers when they make some kind of attempt to shun their own genre. The moment when they start telling the press “Nah bro, we see ourselves as more like The Beatles. Rap rock is just some shit that people labelled us with.” Along with Washed Out, Toro Y Moi was kinda the whole chillwave deal, a genre with less legs than a tennis ball. It went from "Sound of the Future," to "LOL" in supertime. Alongside witch house, it’s become the go-to "stupid genre that proves the current generation of music fans are twits." It's a genre that any artists associated with will do their best to try and distance themselves from. And “June 2009” is Toro Y Moi’s latest attempt to tell the people that he’s more than just a man with a MySpace and a grainy profile picture of a beach.

To try and prove that he isn't a Chillwave flash in the pan, Mr. Moi has interestingly decided to look backwards. Instead of travelling the length of the Amazon or doing drugs (or dangerously combining the two), our man has gone back to his halcyon days and released some of this early material. Luckily for him, his early material doesn't consist of him and three schoolmates knocking out a version of Smells Like Teen Spirit and some comedy skits on a four track. Because that's what my early material consists of. So, sadly, yes, it seems the title is neither a reference to the Chongqing landslide disaster or the death of Gabonese President Omar Bongo, but instead refers to the time when he started on his musical journey (an album title format pioneered by Usher's seminal 8701). To be honest I expected to be bored shitless by this album, thinking it might be another in a long line of technically proficient, but ultimately uninspiring American records that people who run blogs mostly read by themselves enjoy. But, actually, there are some strong hooks on this record. “Dead Pontoon” and “Take The L To Leave” have a kind of AM Radio vibe about them. I mean, it's an AM Radio which has been lowered to the bottom of the well, to comfort a trapped man with at the bottom, because the fidelity on this album is lower than David Koresh’s. I know it’s home-recorded but even back in the primitive days of mid 2009, when Drake was still just a guy who turned up on other peoples records, you could still get a bit of Absolute Radio noise glamour on Windows Vista. In terms of "retrospectives" of unreleased material it's one of the better examples, it doesn't at all sound like anything Courtney Love has been holding to ransom. It's always a bonus with retrospectives that the artist still walks the earth. But predictably, the album’s downfall is that it’s not really an album, is it? It sounds more than schizophrenic, trying to be The Replacements, Wang Chung and Air all at the same time. It feels unnecessary, maybe Toro Y Moi should just invest in a hologram if he really wants to summon up the spirit of his late noughties self. But a lo-fi hologram, of course. Like one of those ones you get in children's cereal.