Nobody’s weathered the rise-and-fall arc of the whole “chillwave” microtrend quite like Chaz Bear, who took that scene’s impressionistic lo-fi genre-liminal bleariness and used it as a long-term pivot towards psychedelic indie-pop-soul. That Toro Y Moi makes this approach seem like a gimme-level foregone conclusion speaks to both his adaptability and his adventurousness, and Mahal stirs up a lot of cross-generational memories in the process. It simultaneously nods to the late ’60s baroque psych of the Zombies and the Pretty Things, the sprawling Rundgren-ite efforts to update that sound for a synthesized studio-rat ’70s, and the Kitty Craft/Land of the Loops bedroom-pop set’s turn towards rewiring that sound with a sampler-helming pastiche. His prosaic-on-paper lyrics flourish when they examine millennial-zeitgeist anxieties and reckonings through a voice that finds the expressive melancholy in sounding dazed — the ambivalence of seeking the comfort of nostalgia and finding the ache of loss in its place (“Déjà Vu”), the urge to escape the dregs of loneliness through connections as simple as the mail (“Postman”), the difficulty in figuring out what’s hot without a FOMO-driven feeling of uncertainty and detachment (“The Loop”). The peaks are all at the album’s extremities: opener “The Medium,” an instrumental collab with Unknown Mortal Orchestra which imagines a version of glam that leans just as much into the dirtbag hard rock vamping of The Man Who Sold the World as it does its Ziggy Stardust peak, and the closing two-fer that follows up the Mattson 2-abetted, Isleys-burbling champagne-soul saudade “Millennium” with the hyperpower-pop of Wings-go-supernova “Days In Love.” But the journey between those two points takes so many excursions from any reference points that could pin him down for more than a song or two — replete with deliberately jarring inter-song transitions and abrupt stylistic about-faces — that it finds strength in another cross-generational concept that could stand revisiting: an album that works best when you listen to it as an album.