WHY?
Alopecia
(Anticon)
Few lyricists—outside of perhaps the realm of black
metal—are as obsessively morbid as Why? songwriter Yoni Wolf.
Probably none are as self-conscious about it. From opener “The Vowels,
Pt. 2,” which has him “filming his own fake death” to the coda
“Exegesis,” a brief, circular suicide diagram, death casts a long
shadow. Even his love songs are grim: The lilting, affectionate “These
Few Presidents” has as its most romantic sentiment the promise, “Even
though I haven’t seen you in years/Yours is a funeral I’d fly to from
anywhere,” and the musically upbeat occultist mash note “Fatalist
Palmistry” bookends fleeting hope with the lines “I sleep on my back
’cause it’s good for the spine/and coffin rehearsal” and “God put a
song on my palm that you can’t read/I’ll be embalmed with it long
before you’ll see.” Why?’s gallows act would be pretty
depressing—okay, it is pretty depressing—if it
weren’t so full of unexpected, funny, and downright thrilling turns of
phrase.
Musically, this is Why?’s most solid work yet, the full realization
of their transition from bedroom-produced post-hop toward something
more freaky and folky. Ghostly samples and echoes accent
electric-guitar peals and bass dirges; minor-key piano melodies follow
funeral-procession rhythms. Walking down the street, the nodding,
downer cadences of “Good Friday” or “By Torpedo or Crohn’s” feel like
an enveloping force field—gloom as a comforting coat. (The
notable exception to the overwhelmingly dark mood is the
near-Weakerthans prairie twang on the briefly bright chorus of
“Fatalist Palmistry.”)
When the lyrics aren’t grave digging, they’re confessional, full of
what Wolf calls, “The kind of shit I don’t admit to my head shrinker”:
Here’s Wolf jacking off in an art museum bathroom; here he is losing
his lunch on his shoes in the Whole Foods parking lot; here’s him
angrily stalking Berlin after dark; here he is neurotically
oversanitizing his hands. Throughout, Wolf’s wordplay is clever and
agile enough to make even the heaviest or most absurd scenes
charming—”The Fall of Mr. Fifths” features a double-time
breakdown about school-district funding and interpretive dance
(seriously) that just totally slays. Alopecia may lack the
bright spots of the band’s previous, Elephant Eyelash, but
it’s no less stunning an album. ERIC GRANDY
SORCERER
White Magic
(Tirk)
1/2
The formula is as righteous as airbrushed custom vans and slip-on
checkerboard Vans: Take ’80s dance-floor pop, spliff it out with
downtempo-beat aesthetics, and burnish with
cosmic-disco synthery.
The result is sensual, tacky, and irrefutably cool—an earnest
homage to an oft-scoffed-at era of influence. It’s the ’80s unstuck in
’08. Call it “yachtronica.”
Sorcerer is Oakland, California, dweller Daniel Saxon Judd. Hard to
guess his age from the scant info available on his
MySpace page,
but it’s easy to imagine he wasn’t roller-skating to Bananarama when
“Cruel Summer” was a hit. Still, for any child of the ’70s, slave to
the ’80s, or fan of things vocoded, synthesized, and sequenced, Judd
taps into a long-dormant heartbeat.
Sorcerer’s aesthetic is more faraway, less accessible than his
radio-ready source material, however. His elaborate electronic update
of otherwise sparse, economical pop has the indulgent, introverted
sense of a bedroom project—it’s a layered labor of love. Tracks
with names like “Surf Wax,” “Egyptian Sunset,” and “Hawaiian Island”
run upward of six or eight minutes—plenty of time to mix a mai
tai and saunter to the foredeck of your nearest cabin cruiser. The
tracks don’t actually go anywhere, per se; instead they purposefully
linger in pastel ambience, basking in a palette of sunset and surf hues
as evocative as the beachside sounds that start the album rolling.
Listen: If you’ve ever in your life worn boat shoes—ironically
or no—it’s your duty to appreciate this stuff. JONATHAN
ZWICKEL
CRAZE
FabricLive 38
(Fabric)
You’d figure a fast-cutting DJ mix that crams 27 rapid-tempo songs
into 67 unbroken minutes would have some drive to it. Some of the time,
you’d be right. But for the most part, this Fabric mix, helmed
by longtime Miami hiphop jock Craze, is surprisingly aimless. The first
quarter’s boisterousness—
especially Craze’s opening “Intro,”
where Armanni Reign reads off the DJ’s bona fides—feels forced,
with Craze’s turntable trickery less aural punctuation than distracting
frippery. It buries good songs like Cool Kids’ “Black Mags,” and when
the DJ slips in Jan Hammer’s “Miami Vice Theme” for that soupçon
of kitschy “fun” (as well as a nod toward his city’s roots), it lowers
the disc’s energy instead of raising it.
The disc’s second quarter is where its momentum lies, beginning with
an Eli Escobar remix of Chromeo’s “Bonafied Lovin'” and working through
to Armand Van Helden’s “I Want Your Soul.” You might expect Craze
cueing Debbie Deb’s Latin freestyle classic “When I Hear Music” to
shift things further into focus, but as with the “Vice Theme” it
instead drags things to a halt, and this time the set never really
recovers. A handful of songs step out from the pack—Switch’s
goony-in-a-good-way remix of the Chemical Brothers’ “Get Yourself
High,” DJ Laz’s bleep-and-breakbeat-driven “Red Alert,” Klever’s frosty
electro remix of Pase Rock’s “Lindsay Lohan’s Revenge”—but I wish
I were hearing them on their own, rather than as part of this mix.
MICHAELANGELO MATOS
Craze performs Fri March 7 at Sing Sing, the War Room, 9 pm,
21+. With DJs Klever, Pretty Titty, Fourcolorzack.
Vyvan
Neil
Mike
Rick