It seems like Yoni Wolf and his band WHY? may have settled into a cycle of five-year crafting of albums. The last WHY? album was 2019’s AOKOHIO and it was an extraordinary collection of abstracted miniatures locked together with each other and with the accompanying films with Swiss watch intricacy. This one is every bit as ambitious in its execution – perhaps more so as it’s super grand in its scope, expanding out in all directions from the hodge-podge of leftfield and psychedelic influences that have always informed WHY? into the more wide open spaces of the collective American imagination.
That grand sweep is a big shift. Wolf, and the Anticon collective he emerged with around the turn of the millennium, were all about super-introspective, eternally self-referential, fernickety verbal gymnastics and trippy sound collage that aspired to hip hop’s groove and sass but ultimately remained well and truly in the indie dork corner of things. That’s not a put-down: from the off, they did incredible things with vast vocabularies and self-interrogating ovaractive minds, and the cLOUDdEAD collective at their heart was for a little while one of the greatest psychedelic bands on the planet.
All of that was present in WHY?’s music as it evolved, but here it’s opened up into BIG SONGS. All of the density, all of the psychotropic weirdness, all of the neurosis is still here woven into the fabric of it all – but somehow Wolf and co have managed to channel Fleetwood Mac, The Carpenters, even Coldplay into songs that touch on deep fundamentals about ageing, fear, relationships and their breakdowns, and all that fun stuff, and done it with utter sincerity. There’s a bit of that fundamental alt-Americana depth you get in Dinosaur Jr and Smog too, just to really add heft to the project. And that five years of crafting has somehow made it work devastatingly. This is still a dorky, trippy, peculiar album, but it may make you sing, sway and cry too.
Listen to "Jump":
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