Wish on the Bone by Why Bonnie
‘Wish on the Bone’ by Why Bonnie
“Don’t worry about losing your accent,” a father counsels his son in “Outfit,” a particularly potent dose of Southern-man wisdom from Jason Isbell’s Drive-By Truckers era. Why Bonnie frontwoman Blair Howerton, who hails from Texas but lives in New York City, still hasn’t lost her accent on the band’s second album, Wish on the Bone.
Howerton has, however, lessened her sense of longing for the places that formed that accent, and in turn her band looks for other musical locations besides the country styles that helped define its first album, 2022’s 90 in November.
Those locations aren’t without homesick wistfulness: the dark-end bassline, grungy guitar riffs, and Tonka-toy synths of “Dotted Line” aren’t the only elements on this LP that resume the unfinished business of 1990s alternative-rock, although the lyrics about get-rich, stay-young scams are as modern as Elon Musk and as old as the phrase caveat emptor.
In its softer moments, between slashes of electricity and cymbals, “Headlight Sun” recalls the sleepily drifting pleasantness of Cowboy Junkies; “Peppermint” guides a melodic sureness through deceptively simplistic placement of “random” guitar notes and other little sonic squibs, a la the Breeders; and “Fake Out” draws upon the sly feminine power that Velocity Girl and Helium used to crank.
Bandmates Josh Malett and Chance Williams remain steady supporters and enhancers, while co-producer Jonathan Schenke, who’s also worked with some very indie acts like Snail Mail and Parquet Courts, adapts, with no perceptible trouble, to Why Bonnie’s idea of Americana.
That idea itself adapts to outer space in “Three Big Moons,” an astronaut’s isolated-desolation tale given twang and a porch fiddle, and to the slowly disintegrating relationships and hopes of “Green Things” and the final track, “I Took the Shot,” which says what it has to in less than two minutes. Howerton hasn’t lost her accent; she’s gained a larger vista.
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