Review: Toro y Moi – Hole Erth

Toro y Moi’s eighth album Hole Erth is surprisingly monotonous, but a scattering of great songs saves it.

 

The best part of listening to a new Toro y Moi album is not knowing what to expect. Chaz Bear, the man behind the Toro y Moi moniker, has proven to be as adept at genre-hopping as someone like Beck. Case in point: after he released the funky and psychedelic-inspired MAHAL in 2022, he gave us the completely acoustic folk EP Sandhills last year.

Bear’s eighth album under the Toro y Moi name, Hole Erth, acts as a microcosm for these stylistic shifts by repeatedly leaving you guessing what the next track will sound like. It’s hard to pin down musically, but falls somewhere between his two 2015 releases: the retro rock of What For? and the minimalist hip-hop of Samantha.

The album’s description on Bandcamp cites its styles as “rap-rock, Soundcloud rap and Y2K emo,” or to be less esoteric: “anthemic pop-punk next to autotuned, melancholic rap.” This aforementioned gloomy rap is the most prominent part of Hole Erth, but also its weakest. The opening track “Walking in the Rain” sets the stage for this style with a simple digital drum beat set to a plodding tempo, ambient synths, and copious auto-tune on Bear’s voice. This is the same formula that Bear introduced on Samantha and then expanded upon with his 2019 mixtape Soul Trash, so it’s something he handles well. However, the follow-up track “CD-R” contains more or less the same components, with only minor changes. The same can be said for the tracks “Babbydaddy,” “Madonna,” “Undercurrent,” “Off Road,” and “Smoke,” which sound so alike that they’re forgotten almost immediately.

There’s also a bevy of guest rappers on Hole Erth, just like Samantha, including Don Toliver, Kenny Mason, and Kevin Abstract, but their features are never front-and-center enough to rise above the album’s general uniformity. I’m not sure if I’m just too old for what the kids call “emo rap” or if it’s just not my cup of tea, but both Samantha and Soul Trash felt much more varied and did a better job of showing off Bear’s hip-hop chops.

Thankfully, there are some really strong, upbeat tracks on Hole Erth that manage to break up the monotony. “HOV” has the same beat as the hip-hop tracks, but throws in a distorted guitar melody to give it some sticking power. Bear’s voice is less auto-tuned here, and he sings the chorus so proudly that he can be forgiven for the Reading Rainbow-tier lyric “like a butterfly, I’ma touch the sky.” The track “Tuesday” was chosen as a single for obvious reasons, combining the beat and flow of the rap tracks with distorted guitar riffs and some of Bear’s best singing to date. Unfortunately, it’s also the shortest track on the album. “Reseda” is another quality hybrid rap-rock track, with guest verses by rappers DUCKWRTH and Elijah Kessler wedged between enough distortion to edge the track’s guitar into shoegaze. The closing track “Starlink” doesn’t have any rock aspects, but manages to stand out just by utilizing a fast breakbeat. If nothing else, that shows how the album could have done with more tempo changes.

If there is one thing Hole Erth does surprisingly well, it’s nostalgia for indie-listening millennials. Much like how Bear snuck a quote from the 2002 Modest Mouse side project Ugly Casanova into the 2018 single “Freelance,” he adds a much more overt reference to Canadian indie rockers Broken Social Scene on the track “Heaven.” About halfway through the song, Bear starts singing “Park that car, drop that phone, sleep on the floor, dream about me,” which you might recognize as the chorus to the band’s 2002 hit “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl.” Relatedly, the track “Hollywood” gets old-school indie cred by having Ben Gibbard appear as a guest vocalist. References to bygone technology also abound, from the track “CD-R” where Bear reminisces on the days of burning CDs and Blackberries, to the dial-up modem sounds on “Hollywood.” If nothing else, Bear knows his 30-something audience well.

On the track “Madonna,” Bear raps “You my ray of light, yeah you my Madonna, love the way you change, how you always switchin’ genres.” Despite the comparison to the pop icon, this line might also be self-referential, as Hole Erth again proves that Toro y Moi can’t be confined to one particular style. The album does dwell too long in its moody hip-hop, and could have done with more variety overall, but a scattering of great songs and no egregious missteps saves it. Hole Erth might not be anywhere near Toro y Moi’s best, but if you’re not a fan of it, just know that his next album will almost certainly be very different.

Rating: 6/10