Side B features a vinyl etching showcasing lyrics from the EP! 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 …
Read More
Side B features a vinyl etching showcasing lyrics from the EP! 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 indiepop 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. And the title track has subtle allusions to growing up a Black art kid in the American South: "saved again by calamine/ another bite/ this happens time to time/ i'm spotted white/ maybe it's just where i'm from/ i always had my guard up/ but hypocrites keep strollin in/ and rubbin on my shoulder". Even the closing novelty track "Said Goodbye To Rock n Roll" has all the makings of a Chris Stapleton hit if you just to 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.
Read Less
