Some of the songs on WHY?’s Eskimo Snow are mawkish and self-indulgent, while others are delicate and strange. All are weird. In fact, discounting those records that seemingly exist only to increase the quotient of the Absurd in the universe, Eskimo Snow may very well be the strangest record I’ve ever heard.
Perhaps this is because, although I wouldn’t count myself as a serious Why? fan, before hearing Eskimo Snow I was familiar enough with their work to know that, well, there should be some rapping atop the herky-jerky time changes and vaguely psychedelic production flourishes. I thought the group’s previous release, 2008’s Alopecia, was pretty cool, really. You mix very modern sounding indie rock/pop with the rapping sing-song of leader Yoni Wolf – a man who, more successfully than not, manages to channel Burroughs and Jay-Z in equal measure, creating an artistic persona that I imagine is not that different from what Woody Allen would’ve come up with if he were less into Django Reinhardt and more into Ultramagnetic MCs. At the best moments, you end up with something like “The Hollows” – a menacing-but-catchy song that transports you into Wolf’s world, a bourgeois nightmare of privilege, sexual frustration, and self-loathing. (But with jokes!)
Eskimo Snow, on the other hand, is about as hip-hop as, well, Woody Allen. According to a recent interview with Wolf by the Fork, the band recorded both this and last year’s record at the same time (but mixed them at different times), and in some ways, listening to both records, this makes sense. Like Alopecia, Eskimo Snow can have a sort of kaleidoscopic feel to it (I don’t know how syn aesthetic you happen to be, but if I were to describe how these records might look, I’d reference Yellow Submarine and Edward Gorey and let you take it from there.) and, like Alopecia, it veers wildly between quirky pop and prog rock. But, beyond all the inherent similarities between two records by the same group, that’s about where the similarities end. For one, Eskimo Snow finds Yoni singing every song (rather than the usual occasional). For another, Why? implements traditional song structures here far more often than they had previously (which is not to say that this is like listening to a New Pornographers record).
Still, it’s hard not to be taken aback by something like “Even the Good Wood Gone,” a song that, if you squint, might even be alt.country. Or how about “The Shadow of My Embrace” – a song that begins sounding a bit Motown before, with a perky snare pop, jumping into a chugging, Velvet Underground groove. And then we’re back into something that might be blue-eyed soul (and is that the sound that begins Weezer’s “El Scorcho”?). If this sounds disorienting, it sort of is, but at the same time, you can’t deny that Wolf and co. have a distinct (if idiosyncratic) ear for melody, and that keeps everything tethered together – at least as much as possible. Indeed, as weird as “Embrace” is, it’s also pretty fuckin’ great – my favorite on the record, and one of my favorites of the year. Maybe it’s the upper-middle class Jewish male in me (winning the war against the upper-middle class gentile male in me), but there’s something about Wolf’s at-times uncomfortably honest lyrics that is endearing in its unvarnished fucked-upedness. As the band careens towards a triumphant finish on “Embrace,” Yoni whines, “Am I clean? Lord, please, why me?” and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find that statement as affecting as anything else moaned to song from this year.
