Why?

Bay Area's Why? is billed as an "indie-rock hip-hop" act, and as dumb as that sounds, that's actually a great way to describe them. Alopecia is their third proper release and drifts much more towards the indie rock (thankfully), than hip-hoppery. It's also much more accessible than 2005's Elephant Eyelash, ditching the experimentations in favor of more consistent song structures.
br> The thing with Why?'s "rapping," is that it's more like Anthony Keidus' rocker-trying-to-rap delivery—in that it's more speaking than anything else. The band open up the record with the tracks that highlight his rapping "style" the best, including the dirty-minded "Good Friday," which details a father-son relationship based around the importance of porn. Obvious eccentricity is what Why? excels at; rapping is not, yet they further disguise their plasticity in their "indie" compositions. The bottom line is: it seems like lead singer Yoni Wolf thinks he's much more clever than he really is. The upbeat, poppy "Fatalist Palmistry"—one of the best sounding songs—promptly compromises its catchy appeal with a dumb tale of faux astrology, which leaves the listener saying, "huh?". There's nothing wrong with a little quirk here and there, but after hearing about a cat scratching out some dude's eyes and how "empty sockets sit like catcher's mitts" you might just want to go ahead and revisit the Pavement catalog if you need a fix of wit.

—Michael D. Ayers
03.31.08

Although Why? have often been considered an alternative rap group, and frontman Yoni Wolf a rapper, this is a designation based on their affiliation with avant hip-hop label anticon and the fact that Wolf will alternate his nasally, sung vocals with spoken word pieces, a designation based on the fact that the band is simply rather hard to categorize. Why? are not hip-hop, but they are also much more than indie rock or folk or whatever other genres are thrown at them, staying within those distinctions but also moving forward, looking outward, all while remaining esoterically accessible. This is especially apparent on Alopecia, the band's third full-length, which, while musically resting comfortably in the experimentally-tinged indie rock realm, explores as many other influences as it can touch without ever overextending its reach. It's all wonderfully, awkwardly tied together by Wolf's lyrics -- detailed and odd and sometimes all too humanly crude -- which find a way to be both extremely intimate and detached, simultaneously. "These Few Presidents" alludes to death, though it's probably about a break-up ("At your house the smell of our still living human bodies and oven gas"), "Simeon's Dilemma" is a warped take on a love song ("But I still hear your name in wedding bells/Will I look better or will I look the same rotting in Hell?), and "Good Friday" manages to discuss sex, the Silver Jews, loneliness, and R. Crumb, while beginning with the lines "If you grew up with white boys who only look at black and Puerto Rican porno/Because they want something their dad don't got, then you know where you're at." Wolf often approaches his words from a hip-hop standpoint, concentrating on internal rhyme and enjambment, but his intonation and delivery are pure indie rock. As is the band, who layer keyboards, guitars, and electric and organic percussion into something simultaneously melodic and distant, tuneful and difficult, songs that you want to sing along to but then have trouble enunciating the hook to "The Hollows," the first single ("This goes out to all my underdone, other-tongued lung-long frontmen/And all us Earth-growths; some planted, some pulled"). But that, in fact, is what makes Alopecia successful: it displays both crypticness and honesty, intellectualism and vulgarity in equal measure, challenging and placating its audience in the same drawn-out, undefined, nasally breath. ~ Marisa Brown, All Music Guide