When the tempos slow, the playing evokes a muggy summer atmosphere, like the sweltering blues-guitar frug on “Mississippi”-one of several Mahal tracks performed entirely by Bear. “Millennium” is more disco-splashed, with Bear singing about champagne and celebration, but the payoff is a wonderfully wobbly synth solo by fellow chillwave lifer Neon Indian’s Alan Palomo.
Wordless opener “The Medium” has a pleasantly baggy glam-rock stomp, smoothed out by Bear’s psych-soul keys, but it really takes off thanks to a gnarly lead guitar part by Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s Ruban Nielson. Mahal is as fastidiously layered as the rest of Toro y Moi’s style-shifting discography, but Bear leaves the edges rough, connecting the tracks with radio tuning noises and relishing in unvarnished instrumental expression. Instead of What For?, Mahal seems to ask, “Why not?” It’s an album filled with jubilant funk-star yawps, goofier and more open than his previous full-lengths, with an uncharacteristic amount of guests. From an opening engine rev, the vehicle is a spirit guide across the album, a loose and lively psych-funk melange that transports him through styles and time periods with ad-hoc gaudiness and unassuming joie de vivre. Bear, whose father is Black and mother is Filipina, further gestures to his maternal heritage with a cover photo that shows him perched in a decked-out jeepney-a colorful minibus that has for decades been the predominant form of public transportation in the Philippines. Mahal, Toro y Moi’s seventh studio album and first for indie stalwart Dead Oceans, posits convincingly that what Bear does is also supposed to be-as he told the same interviewer-well, “fun.” The title, a Tagalog word that can mean “love” but also “expensive,” is apparently an intentional response to the question posed by What For?. But it sounds like he’s on the job nonstop-“Everything is time management,” he told an interviewer-and he has enough existential anxiety about the point of it all that a 2015 album was titled What For?.
In a quiet victory for slacker SoulSeek jockeys everywhere, his work for EDM juggernaut Flume scored Bear a Grammy nomination. But more than the often-fragmentary lyrics, what feels most representative of whatever remains of the indie zeitgeist is Bear’s unshowy eclecticism: He can remember when he first bought Radiohead’s OK Computer, but he’s also a house producer and heavyweight hip-hop collaborator. South Carolina’s Chaz Bundick, who later changed his last name to Bear and relocated to the Bay Area, has sung with equal detachment about bullshit jobs, breakup sex, and meeting James Murphy (“at Coachella,” he deadpans). Although Toro y Moi surfaced as part of the slo-mo synth-pop movement lumped together as chillwave, the project’s sole member has always been an aspirational avatar for indie rock’s huddled masses.
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