Chillwave may have come and gone, but its woozy footprints are everywhere: lofi hip-hop beats, Tame Impala’s continued dominance as a festival headliner, the endless barrage of shapeless AI synth tracks floating through Spotify like a garbage island in the Pacific. Disconnected from the actual talent of its OG practitioners, the scene that Chaz Bear (né Bundick) came up through as Toro y Moi has found real staying power in the current ecosystem of inoffensive, ambiguously jazz/funk/ambient sounds engineered for Maximum Vibe Wattage.
Any indie act who’s stuck around as long as Toro y Moi must adapt, and in addition to dipping his toe into disco and indie rock and ambient, Bear has expanded to working with mainstream collaborators like Flume and Travis Scott. His new Toro y Moi project, Hole Erth, is a reference to the esoteric counterculture magazine Whole Earth Catalog, which Steve Jobs once referred to as a “paperback Google.” But while the hip-hop and pop-punk inspirations that Bear draws on for this album may have dominated the mid-2000s culture he came up in, they arrive on Hole Erth having already overstayed their welcome. Unlike his 2015 Samantha mixtape, where Bear experimented with R&B samples and features from Kool A.D. and Rome Fortune to arrive at a unique atmospheric sound, Hole Erth struggles to sound like anything but an imitation.
It’s hard to fault Bear for trying out emo-rap when he’s been on the periphery of both since 24kGoldn was in kindergarten. But therein lies the problem: He’s now 37, sounding every bit his age as he adopts the cadence of music made almost exclusively by and for people younger than iTunes. It doesn’t help that many of his hip-hop nods resemble zeitgeist-y sounds from five years ago. “We back like bad teenagers,” Bear proclaims on “Walking in the Rain,” a would-be Astroworld leftover complete with hyperspace synths and Auto-Tuned interjections. “Off Road” sounds like a Roddy Ricch song about being stuck in traffic; the droning guitar and sludgy vocals on half the album are indebted to Lil Peep, minus the pathos and dread that made him compelling. Even when Bear brings on indie contemporary Ben Gibbard for “Hollywood,” he boxes the Death Cab for Cutie vocalist into a trap beat that combines with his airy tone like oil and water.
The last time Bear positioned himself as a storyteller, on 2017’s Boo Boo, the results were ho-hum. As he tackles two notoriously lyric-heavy genres on Hole Erth, his weaknesses stick out more than ever. On stripper anthem “Babydaddy,” the best he can do is rhyme “UGA” with “MBA.” Elsewhere, he fills choruses with nice-sounding platitudes—“I was stone rolling, I was role playing, I was wind blowing”—that would be fine as window dressing, but come off as rambling when placed front-and-center in the mix. The two exceptions are “CD-R” and “Tuesday,” transmissions from Bear’s early days as an upstart musician with a refreshingly snotty attitude toward celebrity. “Blackberry days, I would talk to anyone,” he sings over a beat that sounds like it was extracted from a Y2K software package. It works a lot better than his extensive quoting of “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl” on “Heaven,” or the gratuitous Tom Petty reference propping up “Reseda.”
When Bear stops trying to replicate the last vestiges of SoundCloud rap and merely takes a few cues from it, Hole Erth sounds more inspired. “Undercurrent,” a collaboration with Porches and Don Toliver, nails the unlikely partnership by crawling a new-wave guitar hook to a snail’s pace and having Toliver sing-rap over live drums. Out of all the guest stars here—including Kevin Abstract, Lev, DUCKWRTH, and Bear’s protégé Elijah Kessler—the one who shines brightest is Kenny Mason, who commands his verse on “Smoke” over moody piano and grunge-y acoustic guitar. With these songs, you can hear the love letter to aughts rap-rock that Bear aimed for, not a misguided attempt at catering to Fortnite players. Unfortunately, most of Hole Erth comes across like the latter.
