Why?
Alopecia
Anticon, 2008
By Allana Mayer
The usual cycle of an album that’s destined to stay in my good graces involves a shift in my favourite track, once every month or so, as my revisits accumulate. I’ve only been addicted to Alopecia for a week but I’m already on my fourth choice. Why? might have thrown me into the rapid cycling of a manic phase, but I’m not complaining. It’s an album you want to learn every word of because each phrase is infused with a power, a humour, a grace, and a truth that you feel the need to incorporate into yourself, so you stumble like an idiot down the street, jumbled phonemes spilling from your throat.
The album’s trivial details are too strange and mundane to be made up, and the realization of this bizarre honesty is like a swipe to the head — the intimacy of it all is embarrassing and endearing. It’s somewhere between Subtle and Arab Strap on the caustic ramble scale: as self-damning and nihilistic as the latter, but less on the relationship side, and more about life in general — though not quite as political or pop-cultural as the former. Less artsy non-sequiturs, more depraved and dirty slices of life. Less imaginary. More real.
“The Hollows” was the first: an angry and guttural exclamation of disgust, containing the majority of the album’s depravity and scorn. As the poppiest track, “Fatalist Palmistry” bounced me to the other end of the scale, with the childlike selfish glee of having “a song on my palm that you can’t read.” “Simeon’s Dilemma” gets my vote for love song of the year, with its tale of dedicated self-mutilation, and the creepy refrain “Stalker’s my whole style / and if I get caught I’ll deny, deny, deny.” It finds its sister song in “These Few Presidents,” a pleasantly homicidal, lovingly sociopathic ode, with lines like “even though I haven’t seen you in years, yours is the funeral I’d fly to from anywhere” — a backhanded sentiment I wish I didn’t identify with.
The instrumentation is nothing notable, but it doesn’t need to be; it’s just seriously enjoyable — stark when it needs to be and deliciously lush otherwise. Rhythms are clean and healthy, mid-tempo and impossible to extricate from your brain. Lyricist-slash-mastermind Yoni Wolf has a voice that should grate but doesn’t, with its Hold Steady matter-of-factness that is wise beyond the years of the pimply teenage attitude that pens its disillusioned diatribes. The album’s themes include fathers, kitchen towels, messages on hands, and tons of fatalist and Christian imagery. Yet somehow tender notions like, “But I am still alive and loved and wide-eyed in my time”, and “You’re the only proper noun I need” stick in your brain after all the venom has drained away. Maliciousness becomes the norm, making sweetness more powerful in contrast. I’d try to give you more clues about the what’s-it-all-mean, but I’m transitioning onto song number five, “Song for the Sad Assassin,” and fighting down the insistent yet impossible imagery: a dead body in a lake, being lifted like a gown….
Is it real? It has to be real. I want it all to be real.
Thanks for reviewing this. Now I will be picking it up for sure. Congratulations on influencing my purchasing patterns…
holy crap, the system works! thanks, dude.