During an interview with Pitchfork earlier this year, WHY?'s Yoni Wolf called Eskimo Snow, "really the least hip-hop out of anything I've ever been involved with." This might just be a less verbally economical way of saying, "we did this with the guy who produced the last Clientele record." Wolf's got a dry sense of humor like that. It's telling that he put it in those terms-- though 2008's staggering Alopecia won plenty of well-deserved plaudits, the most often-heard criticism I heard was a bizarrely general one, essentially that listeners were expecting a hip-hop record and got subjected to 50 minutes of indie rock. The Anticon name must still be heavy in the streets, but the truth is, as long as Wolf continues to be as candid and vivid as he's been in the past, he'll have more in common with the expressionists of outre rap than the straight-laced indie vanguard.
To a large degree, Eskimo Snow comes off like an acknowledgment of that gap rather than a collection of songs culled from the same sessions that birthed Alopecia. For better or worse, Eskimo Snow eschews the musical and emotional contours of Alopecia for a resigned saunter to the gallows. The shift is made apparent from the album's killer first line: "I wear the customary clothes of my time/ Like Jesus did with no reason not to die." But as "These Hands" progresses, it never builds into a larger statement, just an insular word collage.
But thereafter, the latest from WHY? is almost completely devoid of the black humor that typically undercuts Wolf's most uncomfortable confessions, save for centerpiece "Into the Shadows of My Embrace", which serves as the album's reservoir of nebbish quotables. The drum roll that follows "it'd take a busload of high school soccer girls to wash those hospitals off me" could just as easily be replaced by a rimshot. By the song's midsection, Wolf can barely contain himself, hyperventilating, "I wish I could feel close to somebody, but I don't feel nothing/ Now they say that I need to quit doing all this random f-f-ff...," biting his lip at that last word, embarrassed as much by his situation as the ease of the rhyme itself.
That's pretty much the last bit of levity before the second half's unyielding bleakness. Balancing it out-- and Wolf's curdled, nasal honk-- is one of the unexpectedly pretty albums you'll come across. Much of Eskimo Snow continues in the manner of "A Sky for Shoeing Horses Under" (which gets reprised on the stormy piano ballad "One Rose"), favoring loops of mallet percussion, live drumming, and acoustic guitar. "January Twenty Something" introduces honest-to-god vocal harmonies that blossom and split apart with surprisingly delicacy. But as the album progresses, only the brief, coiled intensity of flanger-lashed "On Rose Walk, Insomniac" proves to be a counterpoint to all those literal bells and whistles. Considering WHY?'s shift towards indie, the mixed meters of "Berkeley By Hearseback" seem influenced by Chicago post-rock. Meanwhile, many have remarked on the similarity of "This Blackest Purse" to the more maudlin side of Ben Folds, while the title track is in the style of the exhausted, finger-plucked acoustic send-off that served as the closer on the last couple of Death Cab albums.
It is easy to focus on what's missing here-- nothing strikes with the surprising pop instincts of "Fatalist Palmistry" or the unsettling hilarity of Wolf's far-fetched and yet somehow affecting closet-cleaning about buttfucking Berliners, throwing up behind Whole Foods, or "jerking off in an art museum john til my dick hurts" (this line went over surprisingly well at a performance in L.A.'s Natural History Museum). But as the cryptic refrain of "no flash photography" gives a new dimension to the weary C&W crawl of "Even the Good Wood Gone", it's clear that there's a hangover to be nursed, a need to "feel nothing" after Alopecia had Wolf "doomed to feel too much," as Pitchfork's Jason Crock said. Eskimo Snow just feels like the right kind of album for an incredibly gifted and increasingly prolific band like WHY? to release as a quick palate cleanser, reaching an endpoint of a certain sound rather than trying to top its predecessor's unmatchable extremities.
