A Year in Records #4: WHY? - Alopecia

Feature by Darren Carle | 08 Dec 2008

“Sometimes I claim to know a guy, but I can’t tell you what his hands look like,” mutters Jonathan ‘Yoni’ Wolf part-way through Alopecia. Speaking in relative terms, it’s a moment of lucidity and, with a hand-collage adorning the album’s artwork, one of very few threads you can pull at and glean any semblance of narrative. “There’s a lot of hand imagery within different songs,” admits Yoni, relaxing in his San Francisco home. “A lot of imagery related to the idea of fate or not really having control over one’s fate. So I used the palm imagery, like everything’s written on your palm already.”

Not that you’d want to linger too much on dissecting Yoni’s frankly bizarre lyrics, delivered in his own inimitable style, pitched somewhere between singing and rapping. “I tend to start pretty loosely with random ideas that might just come to me in a quiet hour when I’m not thinking about it. I prefer those ideas rather than any kind of forced concept. Then I tend to just hone in on it over time and do a lot of crafting, especially these days, especially on Alopecia. But I don’t expect people to follow what the hell I’m talking about.”

Musically, Why? have developed over albums, gradually encompassing the notable indie aesthetic prevalent on Alopecia. Back in 2001, Yoni collaborated with British lo-fi act Hood on their album Cold House. It was a humble yet rewarding experience for Wolf. “Before we ever worked with Hood we were huge fans of them,” he admits. “They definitely influenced us quite a bit. Listen to any of my old guitar riffs and it’s a straight lift of any Hood guitar riff!”

Why? was once Yoni’s handle with experimental hip-hop trio cLOUDDEAD, a band so difficult to pigeonhole that some detractors marked then as ‘smartarse surrealism’. Now fleshed out to a full band, Yoni admits the name-consistency helped him keep what ‘few fans’ he had made. Yet despite these tags of ‘surreal’ and ‘experimental’, Alopecia is also full of memorable pop tunes, probably best displayed by the song Fatalist Palmistry, with its Sleepy Jackson melody and west-coast Byrd’s-esque guitar trimming.

“The attempt is to always make things more accessible without losing depth,” suggests Yoni. “I’ve never wanted to make experimental music for ‘experimental’s’ sake. It’s just what has always come naturally I guess, and as time goes on we figure out how to relay ideas in a way that people can understand, but still keeping the ideas as unique as they may be. I think that’s the goal.” And with Alopecia, Yoni and Why? have scored a blinder. 

http://www.myspace.com/whyanticon