2018 reissue - "I'll go unknown by torpedo or Crohn's / Only those evil live to see their own likeness in stone." It's the kind of couplyou'd carve into a wall whilst savoring the irony at hand, but when Yoni Wolf spit the line ten years ago he was blissfully, broodily unaware that he and his band WHY? were creating a career defining album -- one so fan adored that it would go out of print, and so influential that the artpop heroine Lorde herself would lovingly steal the very lyric quoted above. When it dropped in 2008, Alopecia not only marked WHY?'s evolution from a sonically collaged mostly solo project to a live recorded powerhouse band of badass multi-instrumentalists. It also minted a genre of one: wryly written, poignantly posed, simultaneously swaggering and heartrending songrap that jangles like folk, bursts like psychrock, and sways like chamber pop. To this day, there is no other group in the known universe that sounds or feels like WHY? does on Alopecia. The album's 2018 reissue cheekily etches that aural likeness into our musical history.
A1 | The Vowels Pt. 2 | 4:04 |
A2 | Good Friday | 3:50 |
A3 | These Few Presidents | 3:04 |
A4 | The Hollows | 3:55 |
A5 | Song Of The Sad Assassin | 4:13 |
A6 | Gnashville | 3:49 |
B1 | Fatalist Palmistry | 3:53 |
B2 | The Fall Of Mr. Fifths | 3:16 |
B3 | Brook & Waxing | 2:35 |
B4 | A Sky For Shoeing Horses Under | 2:29 |
B5 | Twenty-Eight | 0:44 |
B6 | Simeon's Dilemma | 3:33 |
B7 | By Torpedo Or Crohn's | 4:04 |
B8 | Exegesis | 1:37 |