I Eat Music

Why?’s new album, ‘Eskimo Snow’, is released in America this week by Anticon. Which is nice for Americans, but Tomlab won’t be releasing it in the UK until 5 Oct. Boo! But you can stream the whole album right now on Muxtape. Yay!

As previously reported, the songs on the album were all recorded during the same sessions as last year’s ‘Alopecia’ album, but take a very different direction. The band’s core member Yoni Wolf has previously described the album at “the least hip hop [thing] I’ve ever been involved with”.

Listen to it here: why.muxtape.com

Bike For Three!, aka Canadian rapper Buck 65 and Belgian electronicist Greetings From Tuskan, have never met in person, but they aren’t letting a little thing like that get in the way of creating one of this year’s most intriguing albums so far, ‘More Heart Than Brains’. Having carved out a niche for himself by crossing country music with hip hop, this is Buck’s first album to feature all electronic production, but he takes to it like a duck to water, as Greetings From Tuskan absorbs his voice into her cool, trippy soundscapes, which have tones of Boom Bip and Modeselektor running through them. The lone track up on their MySpace page, ‘All There Is To Say About Love’, is a perfect example of this, but the track that really blew our socks off is the album’s title track, which you can download for free by clicking here.

www.myspace.com/bikeforthree

Prolific hip hopsters Doseone and Jel have dusted off their Themselves project and created a new mixtape, entitled theFREEhoudini. As the title sort of suggests, it’s a free download (although there is a CD version, too. More on that in a sec).

But what would a mixtape be without guests? Nothing, that’s what. So it’s lucky theFREEhoudini is packed full of them. Pretty much anyone you could name from the Anticon family is in there, including a very briefly reformed cLOUDEAD, as well as Buck 65, Aesop Rock, Busdriver, Lionesque, Slug Of Atmosphere, D-Styles, DJ Baku, Pedestrian, Sole, and Serengeti. And it was all mixed down by Odd Nosdam too, which was nice of him.

The download version is 40 minutes long and features no real surprises for anyone who’s familiar with Themselves, cLOUDDEAD, Subtle or any of the myriad projects that have involved Doseone and/or Jel in some way, but that doesn’t make this any less worth listening to. Their sound isn’t the only thing recognisable about them – the endless attention to quality control is in there, and each and every guest turns in a storming performance, with plenty of rapid fire rapping to warm up your ears.

All in all, it should be more than enough to convince you to part with your cash for the deluxe CD version of theFREEhoudini, which features an extra 16 minutes of music and some more guests – Passage, Alias and Fog’s Andrew Broder.

Go and download it from www.anticon.com/thefreehoudini/

Buy Themselves stuff on Amazon

Psychedelic, guitar-pop, folk-hop

If you have any kind of interest in indie hip hop you can probably find Yoni Wolf at play somewhere in your music collection. He’s nothing if not prolific. Best known as one third of cLOUDDEAD and as a founding member of the Anticon label, Alopecia is the third outing for his one-time solo project, Why?

Joined again by his brother Josiah and Doug McDiarmid, Wolf also drafted in Fog’s Andrew Broder and Mark Erickson for this album. Together, the five recorded these fourteen new songs live, giving Wolf’s off-kilter vocals the required loose and peculiar backing.

With those lyrics Wolf manages to paint pictures like no one else as he half raps, half sings. He makes the seemingly innocuous seem beautiful and amazing and the amazing seem like an every day occurrence. I could just about fill my entire word limit for this review with my favourite lyrics from this album; there are just so many gems in each and every song.

The music is a collision of psychedelia, indie guitars, folk and hip hop. Toy pianos tinkle, guitars swell and feed back, chains rattle, drums trundle and bass pushes down your throat. The sound matches the frontman’s own originality perfectly and it’s the band who make this great music, rather than just impressive poetry.

Why?’s previous album Elephant Eyelash was one of the most talked about in indie circles in 2005 and spawned it’s own underground hit single with Rubber Traits. Thus, Alopecia had a lot to live up to and risked being drowned by expectation. Somehow, wolf and co have managed to not only meet those expectations head on but barge right through them and dance around like it was nothing. (5/5)

This review originally appeared on Subba Cultcha

Why? release a brand new album, Alopecia, on 10th March via Anticon (US) and Tomlab (UK). I received an advance copy last week because I’m so cool (okay, I actually begged for it) and I can report that it’s actually even better than 2005’s Elephant Eyelash. Seriously, it really is that good.

In addition to his brother Josiah and Doug McDiarmid, Yoni Wolf is also joined on this album by Andrew Broder and Mark Erickson of Fog. Together, the five recorded Alopecia’s fourteen tracks live, lending the backing to Wolf’s quickly observed lyrics a loose and immediate feel.

The eclectic mix of hip hop, indie and psychedelia that made songs like Rubber Traits and more recently The Hollows so popular is still very much intact. However, on Alopecia it’s explored further and taken down a variety of new avenues.

As is traditional when you have a lengthy tour and new album release ahead of you, Why? have released a cover of Close To Me by The Cure for free.

Download Close To Me
Buy Alopecia
Why? MySpace