AMERICAN PANCAKE: TOLEDO and the stuffed heart melancholia of "Needer"

"I worry about my apartment in New York"

Brooklyn based Daniel Alvarez and Jordan Dunn-Pilz, collectively known as Toledo are finding their way. They have already gifted us all something special this year, their EP "Jockeys of Love", a collection of dreamy songs that feel like a pure expression of 70's garden rock, folk filtered indie rock with dream pop affections, with dark tones all brimming with the duo's incredibly moving iridescent vocals. Every single song is a stunner, varied in texture but at their core, sad and tender with a stuffed heart and hollow stomach. Today, the song in question is "Needer" and the boys share:

"Needer was the first song written and recorded for the EP. In March, we left our apartment in NYC to shelter in our hometown. The song speaks plainly to the concerns that rushed through our heads as mid-twenty year olds displaced by a pandemic. Ultimately, things like property or partying prove trivial in comparison to what we really needed at the time - connection.

The song “did a full 180-baby” when we added doubled drums into the mix. We love spinning a song on it’s head at the halfway mark, and we were able to do so here by withholding acoustic guitar and drums until after the second chorus."

Initially "Needer" felt like a grunge ballad to me, down turned slow core but as it blossomed it became something else, though I still feel the lovely grunge affections within some of the bottom guitar lines. As that blossoming, expressed in counterpoised guitars that sprinkle up like unexpected lawn sprinklers, the song glistens. Love the absolutely dense flush of sounds that erupt through what is essentially a pretty sparse track. You feel the melancholia cutting through those eruptions though, like a stay in bed all day slow moving depression that you always come out of.

-Robb Donker Curtius