Atrist: Why? | Album: Alopecia | Music Review

Tracklist:
1. The Vowels, Pt. 2

2. Good Friday

3. These Few Presidents

4. The Hollows

5. Song of the Sad Assassin

6. Gnashville

7. Fatalist Palmistry

8. The Fall of Mr. Fifths

9. Brook & Waxing

10. A Sky for Shoeing Horses Under

11. Twenty Eight

12. Simeon's Dilemma

13. By Torpedo or Crohn's

14. Exegesis

Release Date: 03/11/2008 Summary: Zach Savage says: “Hip-hop with indie pop beats.” I am pretty much predisposed to liking this.
For anyone familiar with the short-lived Arrested Development, alopecia is just one of the many longstanding jokes that arced over the series. As my handy-dandy tableside dictionary would attest, alopecia is the “partial or complete absence of hair from areas of the body where it normally grows.” What this has to do with Why?’s third release as a full band (on the tail of Yoni Wolf’s outing as a solo artist, him of such adorned outfits as cLOUDDEAD) is for anyone to guess. But with the poker-faced hilarity of the disease itself (and the aforementioned show’s dry wit making it that way), there’s something to be said about the band’s almost ludicrous hybrid of straight-laced indie pop-rock and hip-hop sentiment, like an in-joke that will always be treated with the most respectful sincerity. This might blur the black-and-white, love-it-or-hate-it reception (you can be as “in” on the “joke” as you can be and still find it as shallow as the sexuality on display, and vice versa), but underneath the bawdy lyrical tendency beats the heart of a confused high school kid. One who may or may not love his cousin. Ha, ha?



For those who came in on Alopecia’s first single, “The Hollows,” you can expect the same brash, self-conscious lyricism and tone to reflect throughout the rest of the record (a tone almost completely stripped from the band's Elephant Eyelash). “The Hollows” stands as the most directly aggressive track, shifting among passive drumbeat march, heavy bass line, and awkwardly plucked guitar strings. Wolf’s slightly offbeat, nasally performance more or less fits the moody direction Why? take as a whole, here brought to a head in his confused state heightened by a loss in translation. “In Berlin I saw two men fuck in a dark corner of a basketball court/just the slight jingle of pocket change pulsing” becomes a hazy climax where Wolf, duped by foreigners and looking to pick a fight, finally yelps, “But all my homies warned me, ‘Oh no, those gypsies probably got kniiives!’” As a standalone track, it’s considerably one of Alopecia’s weakest, but there’s something stupid-smart hidden in its alienating nature as the first preview of Alopecia.



Even so, Alopecia is appropriately likable, with some of the strongest opening tracks this year. Starting with the catchy reverb-washed drum machine and hand clap mixed with Yoni’s subtly layered vocals, “The Vowels Pt. 2” makes a name for itself as one of Alopecia’s finest tracks. When the vowels themselves make themselves noticed (“Cheeri-a, cheeri-ee, cheeri-aye, cheeri-o, cheeri-yooou”), it proves as irresistible a hook as any to follow. The song gives way to a wash of feedback, climaxing into the simple boom bap of the strongest hint of hip-hop influence on Alopecia, “Good Friday.” Complemented by a simple clean guitar chord, “Good Friday” banks on the story of a white boy in suburbia caught in a naïve gangster stereotype. “If you grew up with white boys who only look at black and Puerto Rican porno/cause they want something that their dad don’t got/then you know where you’re at” jumpstarts a passage that ends with a coke binge in a Starbucks bathroom. The song is sprinkled with brief, layered vocal passages that pass for choruses, where Wolf & Co. state: “If I’m sinking and laughing at something sunken in, I am,” which translates either as a plea for help or a drunken spiel, or both.



Lest you mistake Wolf’s sexual pungency as Alopecia keeping itself an arm’s length away emotionally, the album is very much nestled into the ins-and-outs of everyday life, filtered through (and possibly the reason for mistaking realism for emotional apathy) Wolf’s half-sung, half-rapped vocal work. Many times throughout, Alopecia feels like the journal of a teen desperate to connect when he has no idea how to, with the firm belief that he’s an “example of a calculated birth” thrust into the ho-hum meanderings of suburban life, suburban love, suburban divorce, and suburban suicide. The quirky post-whatever in “These Few Presidents,” shifted into the climaxing march of its chorus, believes solely in the change drowning in his pocket and his inability to let go. Why? caters to a generation of first loves when Wolf sings on the playful toy piano bridge: “Even though I haven’t seen you in years, yours is the funeral I’d fly to from anywhere.” As the last three paragraphs can attest, you can get pretty hung up on these first four tracks alone, but the rest of the album easily defies the challenge of supporting such a strong first half.



Starting with the locomotive piano rush of “Song of the Sad Assassin” to the fitting woodblock anticlimax of “Exegesis,” Alopecia further expands on the ideas that Why? frequently tread on. “The Fall of Mr. Fifths” is another hip-hop defined track, beautifully rendered with piano interludes and treble-heavy drum kits. We're to assume Mr. Fifths is the amendment, and the song becomes a tangent of religion, sex, women and whatnot thrown out in word vomit. The strong indie pop-rock vibe of tracks like “Song of the Sad Assassin” and “Fatalist Palmistry” lift the album past its abrasive niche, with the former strung on Wolf’s voice, which is lovingly and awkwardly pushed above the delicate tempo beneath him. The latter houses the conventional indie rock styling of bands like The Weakerthans, later channeled through the sickly “Simeon’s Dilemma.” Alopecia’s greatest flounder then would be in “By Torpedo or Crohn’s,” which would look better on a cutting room floor in the midst of the better pop-hop hybrids preceding it.



Even so, Alopecia stands out as an interesting little album. It’s self-indulgent in much the same way it’s homophobic, playing both up to play off a sense of insecurity, which in turn masks some inherent cockiness. That’ll obviously play to a certain crowd, one made up, presumably, of white boys with v-neck shirts and who ironically love mainstream rap. But that’s what you get with some dry wit, poppy indie rock, and some phat beats, and that, my friends, is what makes us cool.



-Lew ft. Zach