Why?
Alopecia
Why? are Midwesterners at a glance and Oakland to the bone. Alopecia, their second full-band affair, would sound perfectly placed in a jukebox between Deerhoof and Silver Jews, but even as Anticon’s flagship unit leans heavy into an indie rock slouch, they dig deeper still toward 21 grams of solid gold hip-hop soul. With 2005’s Elephant Eyelash, lovelorn leader Yoni Wolf pushed his twisted croon to Malkmusian heights, and the shag-and-sweater set did take note. With Alopecia, however, he mines the art of rhyme. Embracing verse over his usual metered prose (the Anticon M.O.), Wolf deftly distills his stalker stories, suicidal musings and knack for kaleidoscopic detail into taut, fl uff-free raps. On tracks like ‘Good Friday’ and ‘By Torpedo or Crohn’s,’ he adopts a deadly deadpan to lay down backwards boasts: ‘It feels exciting/Touching your handwriting/Getting horny by reading it/And repeating, ‘Poor me.’ And when he stretches out on ‘Twenty-Eight,’ it’s not hard to imagine Lil’ Weezy slurring out a Dylan Thomas poem about death. Of course, Yoni still sings, and his band still plays’here as a quintet rounded out by Fog’s main musicians. It’s a syrup-sick pop rotted by dark folk, elaborate rhythms and droning psychedelia, but it’s always tight’meticulously so’making Alopecia an across the-
board delicacy of warped obsession.
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