When it came out in 2008, it seemed like we all needed Alopecia for some reason or another. Maybe we were all just terribly depressed in early 2008. Regardless, Yoni Wolf’s brilliantly written bad year writeup – breakups, jokes about the author’s suicide, astounding imagery, fragmented arrangements and all – turned out to have something more than a little universal in its relentless specificity, as his dense songs proved capable of drawing in fans like Elephant Eyelash, a record much bigger and more anthemic than that one, couldn’t. Given that I also found Alopecia more or less tremendous, it was with a great deal of excitement that I learned another album had been recorded with Alopecia, and over a year after that initial announcement, Eskimo Snow, described by its creator as being “the least hip-hop of anything I’ve ever been involved with,” is released, complete with country tinges.
Despite being the other side of what was essentially the same recording seession, this follow-up breaks neatly from its predecessors in several ways; Wolf spends even more time singing than speaking, its arrangements are nowhere near as sprawling, instead dominated by Philip Glass-indebted piano parts, and Mark Nevers’ mix sounds much more straightforward than any of Wolf’s solo work or previous full-band productions. Unlike Nevers’ best production work, for Lambchop or for Bonnie “Prince” Billy, where he took tiny arrangements and turned them into something radiant, here he contains Why?’s implosive tendencies and unfortunately diminishes the band’s appeal in the process.
Whereas Alopecia presents itself in bits and pieces, with sketches getting as much airtime as actual songs, Eskimo Snow‘s material follows more straightforward verse-chorus-verse structures and occasionally gives way to straight-up singer-songwritering like Wolf has never done before, with unbroken acoustic guitar and drum arrangements sometimes sneaking out from underneath his bloodletting, which should be the material’s top priority. After the brief introduction of “These Hands,” more a single image than a song, the record gets going with the arpeggios and toms of “January Twenty Something,” where Wolf presents a voicemail greeting, rewrites it, and refuses to let its chorus ring half as triumphant as it probably wanted to. “Even the Good Wood Gone” does give way to triumph, though Wolf finds himself “the only fool or pharaoh present in a shoddy school museum collection, looted of gold.”
The real success here is “Into the Shadows of my Embrace,” which incorporates enough compositional shakeups into a straightforward pop structure to become something tremendous. Its looping, Glassy pianos arpeggiate over the course of its first section before the song caves into a moment of striking confession; the song climaxes as Wolf’s paranoia gives into the admission that “saying all this in public should make me feel funny,” which takes on all sorts of weight in the face of a discography in which everything “is really self-addressed,” as per Oaklandazulasylum standout “Shirtless, Sheetless, and Sleepless.”
Whereas much of the record’s imagery is very strong, it lacks the sonic turns that stopped Elephant Eyelash from sounding overly conventional and made Alopecia so utterly unique. These are still well-constructed, interesting songs, and there’s nothing really wrong with what Wolf and his collaborators did here, but their boldest aesthetic decision was to deliver a folk-leaning pop record instead of more fractured, occasionally difficult, not-really-indie-rap/anti-rap/whatever subgenre best describes Why?’s music. As an album, it rewards repeated listens, as Wolf’s often-tremendous lyrics rarely seem brilliant the first time through, but these songs offer a fair amount less than the ones that came before them.
