WHY 'Alopecia' album - MusicRemedy

Two years after wooing critics with their beloved Elephant Eyelash, WHY? return, third LP in hand. In short, Alopecia is a collection of hard rhymes and raw-spun songs forced through the stubborn smile of a life-lover scorned and reborn. In long, this is an album of bone-dry jokes, suicides played out in poem, musings on final moments written inside of restrooms, begrudging self-affirmation, and the grit and glories of every day living. Yoni Wolf has returned with the Art of Songcraft tucked under his arm. Inspired as much by MF Doom and Lil’ Wayne as J. Newsom and Big Dylan, his words roll out bent and beautiful, not unlike the musical architecture that sends those words skyward.

As expected, the WHY? band?—Yoni, Josiah Wolf, Doug McDiarmid?—continue their calculated blitzkrieg on that self-made jangle-rap, indie pop ’n’ roll genre, but the stakes are raised. The boys returned to their Midwest roots for Alopecia, hunkering down in Minneapolis’ Third Ear studio and inducting a pair of venerable big guns into the band: Fog mastermind Andrew Broder and bassist Mark “Bear” Erickson. Throwing their samplers to the wind (mostly), WHY? recorded live as a five-piece. By the time the core trio returned to Oakland (where Thee More Shallows’ D. Kesler engineered a final session), they’d amassed their most immediate and cohesive batch of songs to date.

Alopecia begins dark and triumphant: On “The Vowels Pt. 2,” Yoni’s voice comes in strong, sweetly soured like a curdling milkshake. The band lays back for the verse?—weaving feedback, paced drums and bass, simian beat-boxing and bent guitar?—then goes cosmic for the close. Conversely, “Good Friday” rolls forward on a simple live beat that showcases Yoni’s rappin’est cadence in years as he wears his lowest lows like a badge: “It feels exciting/Touching your handwriting/Getting horny by reading it/And repeating, ‘Poor me.’” “These Few Presidents” marks a return to the sing-song style over an alternately bubbly and tempestuous sound, before lead single “The Hollows”?—an outsider anthem featuring the ethereal oohs of Nedelle Torissi and beyond-the-grave revelations from Doseone?—touches down like a twister.

Throughout Alopecia, WHY? further push the edges of their sound, mastering mood on the time-shifting “The Song of the Sad Assassin,” going ghostly with Kessler on a textured death rattle called “Gnashville,” and inflating the warped buoyancy of Elephant Eyelash via “Fatalist Palmistry.” Likewise, Yoni has honed his poems, evidenced by “The Fall of Mr. Fifths”?—a twisted rap hinting at an inner Mr. Hyde?—the sleepy existentialism of “Brook & Waxing,” the oral illustration offered by “A Sky for Shoeing Horses Under” and the complex cadences found in “Twenty-Eight.”

It all comes to a blistering crescendo in the album’s final triptych. On “Simeon’s Dilemma,” Yoni croons to his frequent female muse/antagonizer: “Stalker’s my whole style/And if I get caught I’ll/Deny, deny, deny.” He tests the limits of his voice and the extremes of his own character over a note-for-note combination of vibes, harpsichord and piano. And before Alopecia is brought to its eerie end (the suicide-probing outro, “Exegesis”) we’re given one more offering of reverse rap braggadocio. “By Torpedo or Crohn’s” grooves like a mid-nineties gangsta BBQ jam and peaks with a recurring line from Alopecia: “While I’m alive/I’ll feel alive.” It’s a fitting final thought, even for an album as complex as this?—that the perfect antithesis to the blunt finality of death is nothing more than claiming the lifeblood that is already yours.

Enjoy.

biography
WHY? For what? Which reason, cause or purpose? What unnamed goal?

In abstract, WHY? is the process of adapting to the somehow simple business of existing. WHY? is the searching for something clearly unreachable, with hopes of finding small significance along the way. The attempt to understand what’s really going on by observing, neither by telescope nor microscope, but by naked eye, the intimate details in the most mundane of life’s happenings. The attempt to describe the gist of the feeling of the tiniest modicum of The Great Universal Unutterable Joke we are all always not laughing at—except when we are. WHY? is living out the set-up of that old gag over and over, until we finally reach a punch-line. Or we die and we don't.

WHY? is, most often, a trio of handsome Midwestern men with a shared past, present and future. Today, they fiddle around with skins, strings and bells through microphones attached to tape, presenting their “findings” to the waiting world. In an earlier decade they were all born in Cincinnati. And in the time in between, much did happen. Yoni Wolf, for instance, grew up the second son to an art book editor and a rabbi. He got his start recording bad poems and sloppy beats on the family synagogue’s forgotten 4-track. In junior high he discovered hip-hop; in art school he learned how to drop out. His brother Josiah played drums at worship service as a tot, dominated Concert Band as a teen, and fell in love with the compositions of Thelonious Monk on his way to University of Cincinnati’s music conservatory. Doug McDiarmid would eventually get expelled from UoC for carrying a stun gun, but was first conceived by two French teachers and taught piano while in kindergarten. He went to high school with the Wolfs, where he played in Steve Miller cover bands. In various permutations together and with other now-notables (Dose One, Odd Nosdam, Mr. Dibbs, Slug), these three created and/or contributed to a number of freewheeling rap and lo-fi bedroom-rock related projects, some still unexcavated: Miss Ohio’s Nameless, Apogee, Greenthink, Reaching Quiet, and the now seminal cLOUDDEAD. Their wildest dreams were achieved when they relocated to the West to make pop-inflected psychedelic folk-hop.

Yoni was the first to make the move. For four years, two EPs and one color-drenched album (2003’s Oaklandazulasylum), WHY? was his alone. He honed his trademark delivery—that sickly sweet, half-rapped, singsong-suicide style—shined up his wry, picturesque poetry on life, love and self, and developed a clip-and-collage composition aesthetic using keyboards, toys, guitars, samplers and anything worth banging on. When Doug and Josiah joined Yoni in Oakland, they brought a hoard of instruments and the ability to wail on every last one of them. By chops and imagination, WHY? grew into a thing of flesh, bones and fully fledged songs. In 2005, the band released Elephant Eyelash, and suddenly that once tenuous future seemed solid. Critics swooned; ladies lauded; WHY? did not rest. They toured (with Silver Jews, Yo La Tengo, and Islands). They collaborated (with Danielson, Department of Eagles, and Subtle; Yoni made Hymie’s Basement with Fog’s Andrew Broder). They put out yet more music (the Rubber Traits EP and “Dumb Hummer” 7-inch).

Thus, the impending release of WHY?’s latest, brightest, darkest smile-twisted opus, Alopecia, isn’t so much a return as it is an affirmation of something already in the air. In February of 2007, the trio temporarily relocated to Minneapolis and became five, officially inducting Andrew Broder and Mark Erickson of good-art friendlies Fog into the band, then recording their new work live. As can be expected, Alopecia is a fantastic offering of raw sweat and dreams inspired by nothing more or less than the infinite erring bits of daily existence.

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WHY - Alopecia