Toro y Moi: "New Beat"

Underneath the Pine is full of deceptively musty throwbacks, a palette-expanding maneuver after debut Causers of This (2010) painted Chaz Bundick as a compression-saturated futurist. “New Beat” doesn’t reach as far back as the early-‘80s Italo disco that his friend Ernest Greene (of Washed Out) uses as such a solid base, though. Instead, it feels like an extremely talented garage-synth group trying to play Jamiroquai’s “Canned Heat” using only hazy memories and mumbled lyrics. The dissonance between the tautness of the conventional band setup—bass, drums, a few synths—and Bundick’s always-distant vocals gives off a stuck-between-stations tone, with no leading rhythm or melody to tie the groove down. The music may be more straightforward than on his breakout single “Blessa,” but without a signature lyric, even one as greeting card-esque as “every day is a blessing,” “New Beat” dissolves right before our ears.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. The sort of haze that “New Beat” and the rest of Underneath the Pine cultivates is less about obscuring real songs or buffering weak ones with effects than it is about a focus on the essence of basic jamming, of coloring around the sidelines of grooves. It’s organic, and quite good for sounding so purposely dashed-off. But it would be much more interesting to hear Bundick slave away at a chillwave dance bauble like Caribou’s “Odessa,” an all-cylinders calling card for real smart funk. Hearing him have fun is good too, but the quicker one starts to indulge in the pleasures of semi-stardom, the easier it is to give up on ambition for the fleeting pleasures of late-‘90s acid jazz.