Toro Y Moi, ATP Nightmare Before Christmas

If 2010 was the “year of chillwave” (but hopefully the history books will experience an Orwellian re-writing in the meantime, thus to save us ample amounts of embarrassment) then 2011 could well be deemed the year these bedroom producers that broke out during the summer of the year previous have tried so hard to be taken seriously and to shake off that pigeon-holing genre tag.

Like “nu-rave” a couple of years back (which right now the entire populous of music fans seem to have a shared truce of not mentioning lest we all feel naive regret), “chillwave” as a genre has become somewhat of a joke. Back in 2007 after winning a Mercury Prize on the back of covers of 90s rave hits (some actually, some just sounding like it) the Klaxons set out to show their artistic integrity, calling the very genre they helped spawn a “joke”. Their label scrapped an entire album’s worth of new material labelling it “too experimental” and by the time their rather cumbersome follow-up ‘Surfing The Void’ finally came out in 2010, their former fans had already sold all their comic book hoodies and neon peaked caps, and nobody really gave a damn anymore, immersed instead in this “new movement” called chillwave.

The career of Toro Y Moi, otherwise known as Chad Bundick, increasingly seems to be following suite; a musician trying to stress his genuine technical competency to the point of perhaps overcompensation. While his debut release ‘Causers Of This’ was a smooth and well-oiled affair, this year’s outputs - full-length ‘Underneath The Pine’ and the ‘Freakin’ Out’ EP - has seen the South Carolina producer transform into something of a jazz maverick, alienating as many original lovers of his early mixtapes as he has gained a more wider spread fanbase.

Despite what some - including myself - would feel to be his weaker material, the newer tracks if anything do add a bit more exuberance to Bundick’s live set-up. Backed by a full band, opener ‘New Beat’ shows off a swaggering electrofunk jive that seems to be everything that Justice should have been aiming for on their recent record, if they had not been so obsessed by exhuming Guns N Roses’ not-even-dead corpses.

While the material lifted off the new record does lend itself well live and probably does do the job Bundick intended of adding some authenticity to his back catalogue, it’s still the more keyboard-based earlier cuts that get the ATP crowd moving most - like ‘Blessa’ which drops later in the set and seems to evoke some sort of youthful nostalgic memory in two men well into their late-50s beside me whose dancing and arm flailing makes Iggy Pop seem like an old bore with a pipe and slippers.

As the crowd filters out, I overhear two separate strangers comparing the jazzier parts of Bundick’s set to that of the butt of seemingly every joke in the 90s, Jamiroquai. It’s something that I didn’t want to have to write, and now that I’ve got others to do the dirty work for me - I don’t have to. A mixed bag of a set by a chillwave pioneer striving real very hard to be taken seriously. But I don’t think evoking the pop ghost of a certain 90s perpetual hat wearer is the best way to go about it.