Lots of music videos popping up lately — too many to keep up with as a matter of fact. Conveniently, most of these come courtesy of Pitchfork, among other places. I guess you could call this a lazy attempt at a blog post, but it’s better than nothing.

The videos can be viewed after the cut, and include new stuff from Jonsi, St. Vincent, Spoon, Toro Y Moi and Massive Attack.

Read the rest of this entry »

Kicking off this week’s new album releases on Groundhog’s Day, we have Toro Y Moi’s Causers of This, which is a very worthy debut amongst the ever-growing amount of bands coming down the pipe of similar ilk.

Also garnering a lot of buzz is Midlake’s The Courage of Others, the follow-up to to 2006’s The Trials of Van Occupanther. I’ve yet to hear this one myself, but I did enjoy their previous album to some extent, so I’m definitely looking forward to checking it out soon.

The Soft Pack (formerly The Muslims) and The Album Leaf round out the rest of the recommended releases, with the surprise of the week coming in the form of The Brunettes and their latest titled Paper Dolls.  I only say this because I had no idea they were even working on a new record, let alone having it come out this week.  If you enjoy listening to some very sweet, sweet pop songs, than I’m sure you’ll find some enjoyment out of it.

Looking at these releases, you pretty much have a nice sampling of a wide arrange of different genres of music.  From post-rock to indiepop, it’s all here to be discovered.

Read the rest of this entry »

Toro Y Moi, the moniker of 23 year-old Chad Bundick of South Carolina, made headway during the summer of last year with two really great demo tracks and was one of many that were pushing this lo-fi dreampop to the masses. Dreamwave, chillwave, glo-fi — all terms introduced to us through the likes of Neon Indian, Memory Tapes, Washed Out. We’ll either come to love or hate these labels, and I don’t care to use them myself as I still take a lot of flack for using ‘electronica’ still. To Toro Y Moi’s credit, the man has stated in interviews that he steers clear of any and all of these terms and simply refers to himself as a pop artist.

“Whatever floats your boat, I would just call it pop music”

Anyways, back to the subject at hand. “Blessa” was the track from Toro Y Moi that really caught my attention and has kept the musician on my radar to this day. It experiments with a multitude of layered sounds for a very lush wall of dream-like beats and synths. It’s clear that a deft hand was at work at constructing these delicate textures and sounds.

One other thing I noticed about another one of his tracks “Talamak” is that it’s Tagalog (native language of the Philippines) for the word “chronic”. He’s half-Filipino if you didn’t know! Just one reason to like this guy even more.

His debut titled The Causers of This is due out February 2nd on Carpark.  For our SLC readers, you can catch him live on April 6th with Ruby Suns when they perform at Kilby Court.

MP3: Toro Y Moi :: “Blessa”
MP3: Toro Y Moi :: “Talamak”