Why?, the indie/folk/hip-hop “project” of Jonathan “Yoni” Wolf, an Orthodox Jewish backpack rapper from suburban Ohio, makes music that is harder to describe than the man himself. The closest musical references might be a more rhythmic Pavement or a less smug Ben Folds, but his wise-cracking, deadpan—almost fatalistic—affect ends up closer to old-school Leonard Cohen than anything else. Wolf’s style—somewhere between rapping, singing, and mumbling like the dude who smokes all the time in front of the record store—is the focus of every song, providing its framework and structure. The music just backs up the vocal’s convoluted imagery and bemused, tough tone.
Why?’s best songs are like complicated modernist poetry—free-flowing, strange almost-sentences and ideas, backed up by gritty beats or complicated piano lines, all finally coming together and breaking free for one dramatic, clear, offhand moment, like the exquisite line from “January Twenty-Something:” “because I was messing around with someone’s ex-girlfriend. Again.”
The new album, Eskimo Snow, isn’t quite a wild and wooly, twisted and loaded masterpiece like 2008’s Alopecia. Where Alopecia felt like a walk through a gritty city in winter with a semi-intelligent homeless man, Eskimo Snow is that walk through the back lots of suburbia, in early fall, with your friend’s older brother who has wacky hair—still weird, still fun, but lacking some of the danger and urgency of the first venture. The album’s vocals are more song-like, the stories and moments told in the lyrics are looser but less pointed, there are pleasant piano lines and nice harmonies.
This isn’t to say that Why? has suddenly become something you’d hear on Lite FM; the group’s songs are still surprising and vaguely threatening, asking weird questions and making strange allusions. The album, after all, opens with the death-obsessed and desperate lines, “I wear the customary clothes of my time/like Jesus did, with no reason not to die.” Listening to Why? makes the banal seem darker, cooler, stranger and choppier, and Eskimo Snow merely inserts that crazy pill into a more digestible package.
Voice’s Choices: “In the Shadow of Your Embrace”, “Against Me”, “Eskimo Snow”
