Why?’s Alopecia is a development for the group

Why? is worth listening to, since they seem to be continually progressing.

By Kristin Torres

Published March 11, 2008

Just before entering high school, Oakland-based Why?’s Jonathan “Yoni” Wolf stumbled on an old four-track within the walls of his dad’s synagogue and began an eccentric musical experimentation dipped in folk and soaked in hip-hop. He hasn’t stopped since.

What started as a solo venture for Wolf eventually became a magnet for collaborations with names pulled straight from a roster of some of the most sacred outfits in indie rock and abstract hip-hop. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Why?’s label, Anticon, is essentially a collective of hip-hoppers, folk-poppers and electronica fiends. Anticon acts as a musical grab bag of artists known for combining, collaborating and combusting as often as they go solo.

Why?’s album Alopecia picks up where 2005’s Elephant Eyelash left off. The compositions on Eyelash were blanketed in an overwhelmingly soft sound and with delicate, faint vocals, sung and spoken almost as if Wolf was holding back. It was like the musical equivalent of a kid in a lecture hall raising his hand only half-confidently. Wolf had the right answer, he just wasn’t sure. But as the record progressed, the tempo got quicker as Wolf grew louder and more confident in his own vocal power.

It would take three years to complete the progression. And though it might have taken a while, Alopecia is worth the wait.

The record starts off with the soulfully composed “The Vowels Pt. 2,” with a beat kept by percussion so raw it sounds like the clap of a sack of nickels rhythmically tapped against a kitchen counter. Wolf’s poetry is spoken and sung in the voice of a bratty punk too smart for his own good.

And that’s what makes Why? such a force. Wolf’s lyrics are simultaneously penned like existential, pondering poetry and gritty, narrated play-by-plays.

If Wolf isn’t going on about “jerking off in an art museum john” on the dirty, detailed and ironically titled “Good Friday,” he’s narrating an all too vivid moment on the cool, sedated “By Torpedo Or Chron’s”: a laidback hip-hop effort serving as the musical equivalent to a stroll through Mac Dre’s Oakland. “Today after lunch/I got sick and blew chunks all over my new shoes in the lot behind Whole Foods” he croons with in his signature interspersed tempo.

But Wolf can also pen lyrical abstraction into the same song with lines like “But all their green wood’s wet and unmet/as of yet by the gases of flame/pressing against the pending physics/of my passed down last name.”

Why?’s claim to fame isn’t just its lyrical oddities and beauties, but its nuance in musical dualism. Pure hip-hop tracks like “Good Friday” sit alongside bubbly, foot-tapping dreamy “Fatalist Palmistry,” a song that shows what a hip-hop Shins would be like if all their songs didn’t sound like rearranged carbon copies of each other. Its playful drumbeat borrows from a uniquely happy vocal effort by Wolf, providing the only instance of pep in his voice on the entire record.

Most surprising on the record is “Simeon’s Dilemma,” a track where Wolf nearly completely abandons his spoken hip-hop delivery in favor of singing. It’s a piano-tinged outro that shows Wolf’s emotional side by spiking a helping of yearning and feeling into his voice, a factory which usually only spits disenchanted statements instead of harmonized, lovelorn pleas.

What started as experimentation sees continual development in Why?, and whether or not Wolf finally gets his nose out of both worlds (folk pop and hip-hop) isn’t really a concern as long as Wolf keeps inviting us to listen in on his progression as he gets there, wherever there might be.