| Why?: Why Indeed |
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| Written by Steve McPherson | |
| Friday, April 4, 2008 at 11:20 AM | |
 Sometime in the past few weeks, I read an interview with someone—a musician or an artist or a designer (sorry: a foggy memory is a symptom of reading the New Yorker before bedtime)—where they said that they created things not to provide answers but to ask questions. It seems only appropriate that with a name like Why?, Yoni Wolf's solo-project-gone-band would be asking questions as well.Back in 1997, when Wolf met Adam Drucker, aka Doseone, at the University of Cincinnati, he began working under the name Why? in projects like cLOUDDEAD and Greenthink with Drucker and became one of the principal members of the Bay Area label anticon. But with 2005's Elephant Eyelash, Why? began to shift and change into something a lot more thorny than one man's alter ego. Wolf fleshed the project out into a full band with the addition of Doug McDiarmid, Matt Meldon, and his own brother, Josiah Wolf. Elephant Eyelash was often branded hip-hop with an indie rock twist, but that's too reductivist. It was a record that pointed a way forward, not so much a dilution of a genre as a building out of something new and weird onto the Katamari-like rolling ball of detritus that pop music has become. It was also branded as one of the best albums of the year by many, yours truly included. Meldon has since left the band, so to fill out the sound for the recently-released Alopecia, Wolf called on his Hymie's Basement collaborator Andrew Broder. Broder brought along his Fog bandmate Mark Erickson and they got down to business at the late, lamented Third Ear Studios right here in Minneapolis. Now that you've got some answers, let's get back to those questions. One of the things that stood out about Elephant Eyelash was how strange, beautiful, and evocative the lyrics were, and on Alopecia, Wolf's words have become both darker and more resonant. Album opener "The Vowels Pt. 2" begins, "I'm not a ladies man / I'm a landmine / filming my own fake death," and the second verse starts with, "Faking suicide for applause / in the food courts of malls." Wolf has never shied away from the unpleasant, the unattractive, or the socially unacceptable, but the way he staples topics as diverse as suicide, masturbation, funerals, pornography, and alcohol to alternately funky and gorgeous compositions makes it all seem less confessional or titillating than simply honest.  Why? - photo by Jacob Hand "This is the first record that I ever wrote rap for," he admits. He actually "sat down and made things rhyme and changed the lyrics to make them rhyme more. And it was a blast to work that way. I get little spurts of inspiration or an idea or an image or whatever and then I remember those or write them down or record them on my dictaphone. Then I'll go back and stitch things together and find different connections between things that I've thought about and then put them together." The music sounds as if it's been composed in much the same way. Squalls of feedback swirl around delicately plinked xylophone melodies, and boxy, buzzing acoustic guitar arpeggios ride up against tight drum grooves. There's vintage organ, tambourine, shaker—this is an album built up out of the spaces between other albums' parts. What's amazing is that this congregation of cast-off bits and shameful thoughts actually makes a consistent album, even if the threads might not be easy to pick up the first time around. "That's the kind of music we make," Wolf says. "It doesn't necessarily hit you on the initial listen because, if I can talk about our process, we go down the rabbit's hole pretty deep and pretty much forget where the entrance was. We get obsessed, you know what I'm saying? So anybody that listens to it has to kind of go down that route as well to be able appreciate it or follow what we're thinking about." Alopecia certainly has a labyrinthine quality to it, and I don't mean in the David Bowie's codpiece kind of way. Some trails seem to lead nowhere before showing you something unexpectedly beautiful, as in "Simeon's Dilema." The song opens with a snippet that sounds like it's coming from a radio at the bottom of a well, with Wolf singing, "Stalker's my whole style / and if I get caught I'll deny, deny, deny." It's set against a limpid little piano part that opens up into a cascade of notes when the song proper kicks in. Many of the songs begin this way, with Wolf half-singing, half-rapping about something skewed, but when he climbs to a wobbly falsetto for the chorus, the song turns suddenly heartbreaking, as much for Wolf's unsteady voice as for the words, which stand in stark contrast to the seamier themes of the record. "I still hear your name / in wedding bells," he sings. That kind of scope is what sets Why? apart. As they've grown as a band, they've maneuvered their way into making music that has little obvious antecedent, and it's Wolf's willingness to take in the entire sweep of life, from the beautiful to the kind of shit you won't admit to your headshrinker, as he says in "Good Friday," that keeps them grounded. What they've accomplished on Alopecia is nothing less than giving shape and life to the kind of discursive thoughts we all have, but mostly try to ignore. Download "The Hollows" from Alopecia, or stream below: COMING UP: Why? play the Seventh St. Entry with Heiruspecs and Gospel Gossip on Sun., Apr. 6. $8/$10. 8pm. 18+. |
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| Last Updated: Sunday, April 6, 2008 at 01:14 PM |
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