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Band Members: Josiah Wolf (drums), Yoni Wolf (vocals, keyboards), Doug McDiarmid (guitar)
Album: Eskimo Snow Yoni Wolf has long been a remarkably prolific artist, his discography as WHY? littered with dozens of split singles, EPs, limited edition CD-R's, collaborations and albums with and without a backing band. But he didn't really find peace with that moniker until 2008's Alopecia. Continuing his gradual drift from experimental hip-hop to a deconstructed and highly personalized brand of indie rock, it was an album of angry observations and smoldering paranoia, a singularly engrossing exploration of sex, death, and self-effacing jokes. Still, in keeping with his prodigious creative pace, Wolf wasn't content to create just one album with his now solidified outfit, which consists of his brother Josiah and longtime friend Doug McDiarmid. Even while recording Alopecia, he was readying its morning-after follow-up, Eskimo Snow (out Sept. 15 via Anticon Records).
"The album is, in a way, some kind of meditation on sadness," Wolf says. "There's a certain kind of reserved longing, like a letting go of longing in a way. Obviously, there's all kinds of emotions in there, but that's one prevalent one. In the song ["Eskimo Snow"], it's 'All my words for sadness, like Eskimo snow.' You know how they have all these different words for snow, and it's something that's so familiar to you that you start to see all the little details, and you can explain it in so many different ways, and there are so many different types of it. I just like the way it sounds, too," he says with a pause, "even though it's kind of racist or something."
Though not originally conceptualized as two separate full-length releases, the tracks from looser Eskimo Snow began to distinguish themselves from the dark and tortured Alopecia material early in the band's snowed-in Minneapolis recording sessions. After building the songs around straightforward arrangements and more conventional live takes, Wolf took the tracks to famed engineer Mark Nevers, whose work with Lambchop, Silver Jews and Bonnie "Prince" Billy he'd admired. By the time the two albums were finished, Snow had taken on an organic, country-rock feel, with weary pedal steel flourishes and tinkling pianos hanging over its stray corners.
"We let the songs dictate where they went," Wolf explains. "We weren't pushy with them, like, 'This one was to maintain this kind of identity to fit on this record.' We took each song as its own thing, and there were three songs that were possible for both records and were in the grey area. We thought of all of the songs as one package in a way, like the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are one but three."
Wolf is in fine lyrical form throughout the new release. From his self-comparison to a "forgotten Southern city Sherman razed" in the tersely elegiac "These Hands," to his musings on whether he'll "gain weight in later life" on the surging "Against Me," he writes like a man pulling ideas from a dream journal—and, he admits, that's often the case. The images of himself as a mummy in "Even the Good Wood Gone" and the confounding cast of characters ranging from mongooses and cobras to possums and saints emerged during somnambulant writing sessions. "I have my Dictaphone always next to my bed and say a lot of stuff in there," he says. "A lot of stuff I'll come back to and listen to it 20 times, like, 'What the fuck am I saying?' I think that's the bottom line with writing. You give up the wheel to your other self, your passenger self."
Despite its left-field fantasies and non sequiturs, Eskimo Snow—with its richly textured arrangements and plaintively somber melodies—is the first WHY? album with a legitimate shot of breaking through to the fans that might've been befuddled by the band's early, indie hip hop pedigree. Given the relative critical and commercial strides made by Alopecia, such a breakthrough isn't unthinkable. Still, Wolf prefers to maintain modest goals.
"It's not like we blew up off of that or anything," Wolf says, reflecting. "We weren't one of those bands like Fleet Foxes, who to my perception, at least, put out one record and they were huge. God knows they probably did a lot of groundwork and played in a lot of different bands, but for us, every record that we've done has done a little better than the one that came before it and people paid a little more attention. This was no exception to that, and we were totally pleased, don't get me wrong. We're one of those bands that's on that shallow slope of incline, which is good. Those bands tend to have longevity, even if they aren't huge. We have our steady base of people that always come see us. I respect our listeners. Open-minded people, that's what they tend to be," he adds. "But some freaks, too. Believe me."
