Just as you think things on the current music scene are becoming stale and predictable, as soon as you feel the music scene is stagnating, yet again you are forced to listen to another angular art-rock band, and you're banging your head on the corner of the coffee table in a vain attempt to end it all, along comes something so remarkable, so creative, inventive and moving, it feels as though you're a teenager and you've just heard your first ever decent indie band...
Readers, this W&H writer has just had a minor musical epiphany, courtesy of WHY?'s new album, Elephant Eyelash.
WHY?, aka Yoni Wolf, an Ohio-based hip hop/rap artist who is also part of the experimental Hip Hop collective, Anticon (www.anticon.com) has combined a sinister mix of hip hop, indie, folk, and garage punk with surreal imagery and poetry. It's a challenging album; Alice steps through the looking glass into the bizarre and strange Elephant Eyelash.
This album is dark and ghastly. The imagery is nauseating: eyes that are 'Slits in bags of fat...piss holes in the snow', people who want to 'smoke their limbs off', women who 'act like sluts but are really freezers...' - but there are also touching glimmers of delicacy, both musically and lyrically: 'You can determine where a river once was, just by examining rocks.'
Elephant Eyelash is very much centred around the beginning of the end of a relationship with his (now ex) girlfriend, and as such, the intensity of what he was going through permeates the entire album, and it becomes a diary of sorts: 'Bathed, shaved and oiled, your legs are two skinny dolphins swimming between the mattress and layers of bedding, turning in your drug-dry sleep..."
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I could spend hours quoting lyrical references, there are literally hundreds of quality lines dotted about - each one is a metaphor, a tale of some sort; this album is deep. Musically, it's complex - on the surface it is accessible because the melodies are beautiful, and even (dare I say it?) quite poppy in places. But this is offset in most cases by layers of non-rhythmic beats and disconcerting sound effects using trombones, heavy pianos, and Lord knows what else. In the music of many of the songs, it's possible to discern influences like The Pixies, Pavement, and Talking Heads - however in terms of the lyrics, WHY? stands out light years as a unique artist.
It may well give you nightmares, but Elephant Eyelash comes highly recommended. Do yourself a favour, go forth and investigate...
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