Toro Y Moi - 'Causers Of This' (Carpark Records) Released 22/2/2010

South Carolina native Chaz Bundick is one extraordinary individual. Not only is he a multi-instrumentalist musician of some distinction, but he’s also a pretty damn good photographer too. Add to that a panache – not to mention an ear – for creating the unusual and you’ve inadvertently stumbled across someone with the potential to be one of this decade’s most uncompromising, original songwriters.

Despite still being only twenty-three years of age, Bundick is no green newcomer when it comes to making music. Having learnt his trade as a founder member of Carolina college rock types The Heist And The Accomplice, he’s also collaborated with another rising star of the US underground, Washed Out. Its via the powers of the blogosphere as Toro Y Moi (The Bull And Me) where Bundick really grabbed people’s imaginations though, his Poor And Lonely website featuring all sorts of entries from video links and photographs to essays and a whole album’s worth of (as yet) unreleased demo recordings, some actually usurping the bulk of ‘Causers Of This’, which represents a feat in itself.

Without meaning to get overly carried away or create a hyperbolic scenario where its not worthy, ‘Causers Of This’ is possibly the most dazzlingly articulate, and glaringly unique record these ears have been accustomed to for many a month. Sure, comparisons to the likes of Animal Collective, particularly Panda Bear’s ‘Person Pitch’ and fellow psychedelic experimentalists The Ruby Suns are inevitable, but make no mistake, this is a record that demands your attention, and more to the point, will leave you smiling profusely by the time the title track wraps things up some thirty-three minutes or so later.

Debut single ‘Blessa’ with its blissed out rhythms immediately recall the aforementioned two, its cataclysmic haze sharing a particular kinship with The Ruby Suns ‘Kenya Dig It?’. However, its Bundick’s improvised usage of beats, not to mention a seemingly fanatic obsession with the Italo House piano sound of the late 1980s that makes the likes of ‘Imprint After’ and ‘Low Shoulder’ resonate with a distinctive air of nonchalance as though Todd Terry and Jellybean Benitez never actually existed.

Delve even deeper into ‘Causers Of This’ and you’ll hear disjointed sounds that echo the post-punk meanderings of The Slits or The Pop Group (‘Freak Love’) and laidback grooves of a chilled out funk nature that Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth utilised to great effect throughout their Tom Tom Club phase. Perhaps the biggest compliment anyone can pay Toro Y Moi is that ‘Causers Of This’ sounds like it was put together by a group of orchestrally trained musicians, when in actual fact every sound you hear was laid down by one man – Chaz Bundick.

As long players go, ‘Causers Of This’ is an astounding record by anyone’s standards. That this is a debut album with the promise of another to come before the year’s out from its creator can only point to a resoundingly bright future for Toro Y Moi.