Toro y Moi - Boo Boo

Pitchfork 69

Toro Y Moi’s Chaz Bear sounds increasingly comfortable as a lead vocalist and personality on his most personal album to date, as a still-funky but more ambient side of his writing emerges.

The Guardian 60

(Carpark)

Chaz Bear’s down-tempo project abandons the almost-rock of last album What For? and replaces it with indie-R&B, reminiscent of his 2011 take on 1980s groove classic Saturday Love. When it works, it’s easy to imagine Drake borrowing some of these muffled rhythms and muted pianos for his latest mixtape. Unfortunately, Bear can’t rely on the strength of Drizzy’s personality to lift the weaker songs and when he reaches for the Auto-Tune, it becomes difficult to engage with his distant vocals. It’s Bear’s most consistent work to date, though, and the best songs have a haunted wistfulness that is impossible to forget.

Drowned In Sound 60

In channeling a moodier brand of R&B, Bear doesn’t do much to hide his contemporary influences. ‘No Show’ incorporates a cadence that feels cribbed from The Weeknd’s earlier work, while tracks like ‘Windows’ and ‘Girl Like You’ feel like reboots of 808s & Heartbreak-era Kanye West.

'Embarcadero' is a woozy and captivating instrumental break that blends thick, cavernous percussion with undulating, intertwining synths creating a soundscape that feels right at home with the rest of Boo Boo but also exotic. It’s one of the stronger, stranger instrumentals on the album and Bear made a wise choice letting one of his synths handle the melody instead of trying to tackle it himself.

While Bear leaves plenty of room for introspection (some of which is welcome and insightful like 'Inside My Head', and some of which veers more towards navel-gazing 'Windows'), the best moments on the record are decisively the uptempo ones, where he crafts sleek instrumentals that feel like a late-night speedboat ride and that allow him to play with his delivery. The opener “Mirage” is one of the most conventionally catchy tracks of his career, and it’s not hard to picture it being the track that breaks him to a mainstream audience, while 'Girl Like You' stacks vocal harmonies gorgeously atop a dense, gummy bass line.

'Labyrinth' is another highlight, with soaring, ethereal synths boxed into a tight rhythmic grid. It’s one of the album’s more nakedly dramatic tracks (“A shake in your voice is all I hear when you tell me you can’t decide / Who’s gonna wipe away those tears if you come out alive?” Bear asks the song’s subject). It maintains the album’s abstract elegance but also establishes the stakes of the relationship arc that informs the record (just like how the title can be taken as either a term of endearment or an exclamation of pain).