Alopecia
Alopecia
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Yoni somehow manages to grow and improve with every album. Alopecia is the next step up in Why?’s staircase to indie rap perfection. Every song is meticulously mixed and doted over with lush pop vocals and incredibly intelligent vocals and rhyme schemes. I wholeheartedly suggest this album. It IS what rap can and should be.
Rating: 5 / 5
I don’t know about “genius,” but this is actually a very satisfying, quirky collection of songs. Highlights include “These Few Presidents,” “The Hollows,” “Fatalist Palmistry,” and “Brook & Waxing.” Basically if you’ve been looking through your CDs lately, yearning for some variety, something different and exciting, as I was, maybe you should check this one out.
Rating: 4 / 5
Why?’s album Alopecia (meaning ‘bald’) is a lush, dark, and refreshing album. With so many rap albums with filler, and so many indie rock albums just going thru the motions, this album is absolutely necessary in 2008. Don’t ever try to classify this album, genre-wise. It is full of completely off-the-wall lyrics, masterminded keyboards, catchy choruses, etc. The album blends together perfectly. The album opens with “The Vowels, Pt 2″, laid out over a nice beat, with some nice effects and guitar twang throughout, nicely blending into “Good Friday”, a straight-up hip hop track, with lyrics that he wouldn’t “admit to his shrink”, and a chorus that follows no formula but works like no other in recent memory. Track 3 (“These Few Presidents”) opens up with upbeat drums, keyboards, and melody; however, the lyrics, as happy as they sound, are as close to a depiction of a murder-suicide one can get. Unforgettable lyric: “Even though I haven’t seen you in years/Your’s is a funeral I’d fly to from anywhere”. Potential for a new genre exists within these 3 minutes and 4 seconds. Track 4, The Hollows, is easily the most accessible song, with a Dr. Dre sounding beat, and some nice lyrics, and a typical hip-hop chorus. Track 5 is deeply disturbing, lyrically, and inspiring musically. The piano is stellar here, as if the Beatles decided to back Why? for a song (reminds me of ‘A Day In The Life’, off its antidepressants). Gnashville is another hip-hop track, best listened to on headphones for the backing tracks. Fatalist Palmistry finds Why? crooning with the best of them, singing “I sleep on my back because it’s good for the spine/and coffin rehearsal”, with a playful chorus and beat, actually sounds like Of Montreal a bit. The Fall of Mr Fifths, is a nice hip hop track, with some stream-of-consciousness lyrics, that at the same time seem well thought out. Brook and Waxing has my favorite line recently: “While I’m alive I’ll feel alive/And what’s next/I guess I’ll know once I’ve gotten there”. This track has a nice instrumental break at the end, leading to A Sky For Shoeing Horses Under and 28, two ok tracks. Simeon’s Dilemma is truly a masterpiece, albeit a stalker’s anthem. Try to tell Mr Wolf that he’s not in a boy-band… I think he forgot on verse 1. This songs pairs nicely with Death Cab For Cutie’s stalker-anthem “I Will Possess Your Heart”. By Torpedo or Crohn’s/Exegesis are paired at the end, and are a nice way to end an album that shouldn’t end. This is one of the most ground-breaking, inspired, well-produced album this decade. Why? may very well be a genius, and may “Go unknown by Torpedo or Crohn’s”. Highly recommended.
Rating: 5 / 5
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Clear sound. Good original tunes with unpredictable inventive changes. Sharp lyrics. Sometimes ambient, sometimes street. What more could you ask?
Why? slow rap down, (so you can hear the words), and give it a melodisity which makes it more accessible to the white listener. The lyric style (invented by REM) is obscure but intriguing. Sometimes they’re telling a personal story which touches off resonances in your own experience, but only obliquely. I don’t know how they do it but the words work a magic. Why?’s sound and lyrics have, now, overtaken REM. What they lack is REM’s driving rhythm and that’s what’s keeping them out of the mainstream, but maybe that’s not worrying them and they’d rather stay true to their aim.
There’s a swagger to the rap of Why? that I like. Lead singer Yoni Wolf’s boy-next-door-but-hip voice explores adolescence like it was yesterday (which for him it was). They melt rap, hip-hop and boy-band pop into a wide awake, just graduated from high-school, atmosphere, playing on their youth and sexuality and not realising that they’re not quite making it in the adult world – yet.
So the simplistic skeleton of sound which greets your ears on the first listening fills out with repeated listening to become almost a symphony and you notice female choruses, and melody lines. If you asked me what any of the songs were about I couldn’t tell you, and yet I get strong images from all of them. At times it’s the sophisticated sound of ultra-modernity, yet there’s always that human touch to it.
Or to put it another way:
Like appreciation of all great rock. The first time you hear it it’s like a jigsaw puzzle, but with only twenty or so pieces giving an incomplete picture. And then each subsequent time you listen more and more pieces appear adding to your enjoyment of the overall picture. Whereas with mundane rock what you hear the first time may increase with subsequent listens but by not much, maybe nothing at all. That’s not the case with Why? the first time I listened I thought, this is interesting but not up to Elephant Eyelash (their first L.P.). But what I heard convinced me there was enough there to warrant further investigation. It was only after 5 plays that I realised the album had a real worth. I suppose it’s all down to layers of worth that are not apparent on first hearing. If you want to see them search:
The Vowels Pt. 2 LIVE
on YouTube (and I hope the guy with the crutch didn’t get hurt).
Rating: 5 / 5
Fun album to listen to, very cool artwork too. I definitely reccomend any WHY? listeners to grab this album.
Rating: 4 / 5