September 22 street date. It's only fitting that Khruangbin's first-ever official live releases would be albums paired with their tourmates: artists whose music they love and admire, friends who’ve become family along the way. Khruangbin's series of live LPs traces just one small slice of the band's flight plan through the years: it's a taste of some of their most beloved cities, stages and nights. Most of all, this series ignites both sides of the band's magic: the warm, prismatic feeling of their albums and the bewitching energy of their performances. "Live At The Fillmore Miami" features performances by Toro Y Moi and Khruangbin.
October 20 street date. Toro y Moi's "Sandhills" is both a tender love letter to Chaz Bear's hometown of Columbia, South Carolina, and a poignant, bittersweet acceptance that one can never really go back home. Recalling Sufjan's "Seven Swans" or Karen O's soundtrack work for "Where The Wild Things Are", these loping folk-pop songs are themselves a sort of Saturn return, reminiscent of Bear's first handmade CD-Rs as Toro y Moi. Bear gave them out to friends in the earliest days of the moniker, the releases stuffed in the Case Logic visor of their cars, and each listen brings a little more of that detail to life: the mall after which "Sandhills" is named; the teenaged friends spending aimless hours there, full of big ennui and bigger dreams; the late-capitalist decline and empty big box stores of Sandhills today. Lyrically deft and deceptively heartbreaking, "Sandhills" may be a brief pit stop between grand statements from Bear, but it's brimming with rust, guts, big moods and love.