WHY?
The Fleece, Bristol | October 11th
It’s probably time that we stopped describing WHY? as hip-hop. OK, Joni Wolf has got a talky delivery, and some of the older material is based more around rhymes than melodies. But his now five-strong band of merry men and women make music that is more like beautifully arranged, nerdy chamber pop than the beats and bass of hip-hop, and Wolf’s poisoned poetry is no more rapping than Noel Coward’s laconic chatting over the piano is.
But old habits die hard, and so critics have insisted on being ‘surprised’ by the latest WHY? album Mumps, etc, which is for the most part made up of trademark WHY? verbal cluster bombs, but this time coated in sugary harmonies rather than lobbed through your letterbox smeared in dog shit.
New Anticon act Young Fathers get things off to an excellent start. This trio have an impressively confident sound: electronic squelches of the kind often found on Dels productions, soulful harmonies, an aggressive delivery and a tub-thumping drummer beating out a feral pulse.
As WHY? take to the stage, opener Strawberries sets the tone perfectly, and Wolf – always slightly hard to predict – seems to be in a pleasant mood. New material such as lead single Sod in the Seed traces a line of geek spirit from Ben Folds Five to James Figurine and the Postal Service, and the meticulous attention to detail in the live sound is astonishing: the duelling glock-off in the encore demonstrates the scarily impressive musicality of the band.
Happily, though, the old cLOUDDEAD spirit – brutal, disenchanted but oddly compelling – is never far away. The Hollows, from 2008’s Alopecia, contains the line “In Berlin I saw two men fuck, in the corner of a dark basketball court” which is rewarded with a roar and a chanting singalong. Another old favourite, Crushed Bones, manages to sound simultaneously sinister and whimsical, the forlorn, folky, sparse (OK then) hip-hop that WHY? do so well.
Menacing, vivid wordplay, sparkling, richly-arranged melodies, and an almost jovial stage presence: an enchanting performance from a unique act.
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http://whywithaquestionmark.com/
Words: Adam Corner
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