- by Neil Condron
- Thursday, November 24, 2005
- filed in:
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Having recorded the first Why? album ‘oaklandazulasylum’ as a solo project, Yoni Wolf has brought in three of his buddies on ‘Elephant Eyelash’, released on Southern Record’s Anticon imprint. Having developed his wilfully scrappy approach to composition on his first album and with the cLOUDDEAD collective, Yoni seeks to push this one step further on his latest long player.
Having recorded the first Why? album ‘oaklandazulasylum’ as a solo project, Yoni Wolf has brought in three of his buddies on ‘Elephant Eyelash’, released on Southern Record’s Anticon imprint. Having developed his wilfully scrappy approach to composition on his first album and with the cLOUDDEAD collective, Yoni seeks to push this one step further on his latest long player.To start with a positive: there is some great music on this album, to which we’ll return shortly. But on a negative yet chronologically important note, not much of that music is near the start. The first five tracks are a fairly standard mix of semi-nonsensical lyrics, acoustic plucking and scratched breakbeats. It’s a little like what the results would sound like if They Might Be Giants made a record with The Beta Band. Well that would be pretty good actually, so let’s try that analogy again, imagining Steve Mason is in the depths of alcohol poisoning and has swapped TMBG’s Prozac pills for ketamine “for a laugh”. Yeah, the results are a bit grim, a bit forced, and definitely not worth the 20 or so minutes of your listening time they demand.
But then, 6 tracks in, something changes – the dated slacker hip-hop influences are ditched and things begin to pick up – maybe that ketamine has wore off? Because all of a sudden, it’s a different band: ‘G. Gemini (Birthday Song)’ is a fantastically wonky love song that Stephen Malkmus would probably be quite smug about if he’d wrote it, with the feel continuing into the skipping chord changes of single ‘Sanddollars’. ‘Whispers Into The Others’ is the straightest track on the album, evocative of the spirit of Elliot Smith, while on ‘Speech Bubbles’ Yoni’s random mutterings evolve into something rather poetic (‘Rain is millions of tiny speech bubbles unused/The collected breaths of mutes and all our silent exhalations/where we should’ve put words). Then, on final track, ‘Light Leaves’, a beautifully unsettling plucked acoustic grows into the kind of understated anthem that only a songwriter with the most delicate of touches can pull off. At such times, ‘Elephant Eyelash’ is sublime.
All of which, however, makes you wonder whether Why? may not have been better opting for one feel throughout, or even just jumbling the running order of the tracks up a bit, because as it is, there’s a bit of an imbalance between the two halves of the album. This doesn’t ruin ‘Elephant Eyelash’ - the album is still a bewildering collage of ideas and borrowed inspiration – but it doesn’t do it any favours either.
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