The Well I Fell Into by WHY?
‘The Well I Fell Into’ by WHY?
When a band basically represents the expression of one person’s creative will, it both reflects and refracts that person’s eccentricities and emotions. WHY?, the alt-pop expansion for songwriter Yoni Wolf, finds interesting ways to mirror and distort him on its seventh studio LP, The Well I Fell Into.
A welcome outsider—Brian Joseph, who co-produced and recorded the LP at his Hive Studio in Eau Claire, and whose previous credits include work with Bon Iver and Sufjan Stevens—helps to enlarge the surfaces through which Wolf and WHY? can transmit their waves and particles.
Wolf’s vocal transmissions emanate from the nerdier part of the indie spectrum: his adolescently arrested twang isn’t far from They Might Be Giants’ John Flansburgh and John Linnell or The Polyphonic Spree’s Tim DeLaughter. And his falsetto, displayed within the plinking, mellow “G-dzillah G’dolah,” is bashfully disarming.
There’s also a sign of Iggy Pop’s low-register sadness in “Jump,” a late-night, low-options ballad with instrumental choices (drum machines, turntables, double bass and Moog) and slowly unfolding arrangements that epitomize the band’s knack for delving into styles and equipment as if they’re adjacent boxes of toys.
Sometimes, that results in mere curios: “When We Do the Dance” turns toward the hip-hop side of WHY?, but Wolf’s pitch-shifted rapping overemphasizes lyrics like “I want to bust into your great-grandmother’s uterus,” and a mini-chorus going over the titular refrain can’t quite turn sex into poetry.
More often, WHY? matches toys and tone: cello, viola, and violin amplify the desolation of the bereft narrator of “Marigold”; woodwinds and bongos outline the troubled conversation within the indie-folk “Later at the Loon”; and various tools of percussion underline the exoticized rhythmic shifts of “The Letters, Etc.”
The Well I Fell Into is a cracked window, a funhouse mirror, and cloudy water, but Wolf and WHY? can be viewed through each aspect.
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WHY? perform Thursday, Aug.29 with Baths at Vivarium.
Get The Well I Fell Into at Amazon here.
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