Why?

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More About

• The Mountain Goats (Band)
• Indie Rock and Indie Pop
• Hip-Hop and Rap

So Yoni Wolf used to be a rapper? Well, kind of—Anticon put out the records, but Wolf’s Why? and Clouddead always played with definitions as much as they played any specific kind of music, which was part of the attraction. New album Eskimo Snow sounds mostly like left-of-center high-register indie rock, for lack of a more forgiving term. (Music closer to Pavement than Premier, if you’re wondering.) But Wolf still writes unsparing confessionals on several levels at once, and if they’d like to use the term “folk-hop,” that fits as well as anything. The Mountain Goats might never get this technological, but Why? takes the idea and makes it fly—proving that maybe drum machines do have soul after all.
Thu., June 3, 7 p.m., 2010