Weekly Release Spotlight: WHY?
Posted on 10/05/2009
WHY?
Eskimo Snow
[Anticon]
WHY? songs have always gone beyond verse-chorus-verse structure, beyond drums/bass/guitar, and beyond the comfortable - especially in terms of singer Yoni Wolf's subject matter. On the Oakland band's fourth album, Eskimo Snow, acoustic guitars, piano and live instrumentation have taken the place of the hip hop loops and beats of past WHY? albums. In the past, the band never made songs in the traditional sense of the word, but created vignettes – the music serving as a backdrop to Wolf's half-sung, half-spoken poetry illustrating the absurdity and intensity of everyday life. Those hip hop-backed vignettes may have finally become structured songs, but that doesn't mean WHY? is any safer.
Wolf's embarrassingly dark and poignant (and sometimes creepy) stories of death, shame and love are more potent than ever on Eskimo Snow. When paired with the more organic sound of pianos and acoustic guitar, Wolf sounds more relatable and more pained than normal. Against the colder sounding instrumentation of previous WHY? albums, the lyrics had the luxury of sounding detached, distant and even robotic. It's harder to sympathize with a robot, and the distance made it easier to digest his sometimes disturbing imagery. But now that Wolf's poetry is more natural sounding and more human, it's hard not to be affected by it.
Musically, Eskimo Snow (which features contributions from Wolf's former Hymie's Basement bandmate and Fog frontman Andrew Broder, as well as Mark Erickson) hardly contains a trace of the darkness of past WHY? albums. But Wolf's lyrics – covering topics ranging from religion to sex to death to existentialism and everything in between – is still the glue that binds the band’s sound together, and his uncanny ability to describe the human experience continues to infiltrate the brain of anyone who listens.
Stream: WHY? - This Blackest Purse
Written by Dana Raidt, Radio K volunteer.