Of all the left-of-left-field indie hip-hop crews, Why? are the oddest bird in anticon.'s kooky coop. On Alopecia, Why? MC Yoni Wolf sounds like Leonard Cohen coming of age a decade ago, after listening to the radio when Marcy Playground ruled and hip-hop stations played Everlast and OutKast and R. Kelly's Mr. Biggs dramas. The rest of Why? (Yoni's brother Josiah Wolf and Doug McDiarmid, plus some hired guns) come up with versatile melodies, solid drums just this side of breakbeats, and enough verse-chorus-bridge structure peppered with all manner of guitar atmosphere that they sound more like a band than a sampler.
Alopecia picks up where the sometimes-beatier and -beefier Elephant Eyelash left off in 2005. The jangle-rap indulgences are a perfect platform for Wolf's nasal, some-sung/some-rapped couplets and epiphanies, which are occasionally delivered in the tumbling, fumbling logorrhea of Gibby Haynes and Beck at their marble-mouthed best. “Song of the Sad Assassin” plays like Eminem fronting They Might Be Giants. The band shifts the mood on a dime so Yoni can deliver lines like “I feel like a loop of the last eight frames of film/Before Lee Harvey Oswald gets shot and killed.”
Wolf's a master of the written snapshot (“Even though I haven't seen you in years/Yours is a funeral I'd fly to from anywhere” from “These Few Presidents”) and the unforgettable scenario—regardless of whether you want to remember it (“In Berlin, I saw two men fucking in a dark corner of a basketball court/Just the slight jingle of pocket change pulsing” from “The Hollows”). And with Alopecia, Why? are master framers, giving Yoni's crazy-ass voice something just as chimerical to couple with. Fuck, yeah!
