Toro Y Moi kicked off his North American tour on Thursday, Feb. 6, at the First Avenue main room in Minneapolis.
The multi-lingual moniker adopted by the South Carolina native, Chaz Bear, reads as “the bull and me,” if you don’t mind translating the “Toro” and “Y” from Spanish and “Moi” from French.
For his albums from the early 2010s, the 38-year-old musician has been labeled as a pioneer of chillwave music, a genre of laid-back, electronic pop music.
Since then, however, he’s changed styles with each new record, bouncing between R&B, house and indie rock.
His most recent album, “Hole Erth,” continues to blend genres from different eras, bringing early 2000’s pop-punk angst to the synth-heavy dance music he’s known for.
First Avenue offered an appropriate backdrop for Bear’s project of “international sound,” as it was one of the first clubs to desegregate their lineups in the 1980s and was a formative space for local punk rock bands.
At 8:15 p.m., when 46-year-old Noah Benjamin Lennox took the stage to open, the club’s 1,000-square-foot dance floor was already packed shoulder-to-shoulder with millennial music fans clad in colorful beanies. Many more lined the railing of the second-floor balcony, looking on while enjoying drinks from the bar.
Lennox, a founder of the band Animal Collective, performed under the banner of his solo act, Panda Bear.
His set was accompanied by psychedelic visuals on a 25-foot projection screen behind him. A fast-paced montage of swirling, vividly-colored figures flickered in and out of view.
At one moment, a purple landscape appeared on screen, followed by a woman underwater, an eyeball, an assortment of candy and a lizard. The unsettling and dizzying videos paired well with his own hazy, hypnotic music, shifting in pace with his rhythms.
He ended his set with “Tomboy,” the title track of his 2011 album. The room reverberated with his dreamlike, ambient instrumentals, and the crowd bopped their heads along as he sang the chorus, repeating the line “take my life so high.”
The audience continued cheering after Lennox left the stage, beckoning the awaited headliner onstage.
Bear took the stage at 9:30 p.m. without any theatrics. Dressed in a white sweater and sneakers, someone unfamiliar with his work might’ve pegged his bassist, Imari Mubarak, wearing a bright orange hat and matching shawl, as the frontman.
The understated lead and his bandmates stood facing each other on stage, with their shoulders to the crowd and an array of synthesizers and mixing pads between them.
Bear began the show with songs from his debut album “Causers of This,” which came out in 2010. The first one is “Talamak,” a tune that takes its name from a Filipino word meaning “difficult to cure.”
Throughout “Tamalak,” one line repeats over and over, blending into itself through echoes and reverberation until it almost sounds like an instrument of its own: “Make another telephone call and think of you and me.”
Bear draws from his Filipino identity to reveal elements of a universal experience, using the Tagalog word for love, ‘Mahal,’ as the title of his seventh studio album.
Despite the stripped-down nature of the set, the band kept the crowd’s attention.
Across the packed dance floor, there was hardly ever more than a few people at a given time holding up their phones to take videos, but the crowd kept swaying and grooving along all the while. There seemed to be a mutual agreement between the artist and the crowd that the sound was the most important thing in the room.
Twice during his set, Bear approached the crowd to toss neon-green dog waste bags, branded with the star-spangled cover art of “Hole Erth,” into the crowd, declaring “everybody’s gotta clean up the dog shit,” before returning to his post behind his synth.
Listening to Bear’s synthy instrumentals and falsetto-driven vocals, it’s not hard to see how he could’ve been inspired by Prince and his smooth, funk-rock style: Minneapolis sound. Though far less eccentric than the local legend who frequented First Avenue, it was refreshing to see an artist so well-received by a crowd, without going above and beyond to dazzle them.
