Not wasting any time after dropping their EP Sod in The Seed, Yoni Wolf, brother Josiah and Doug McDiarmid as Why? let it all hang out with their 5th album titled Mumps, etc. This one is different because it has more singing and Why? always creates something abnormal. Yoni Wolf's witty metaphors, catchy deliveries, rhyme patterns and heavy confessionals are great as always. Listen to ''Paper Hearts'' and you will be happy to see that Why? keeps getting better artistically while staying true to what we love about them.
Anticon attributes part of it to how Mumps, etc. was made: ''Far from their native Cincinnati, the fellas spent a month and a half in the Denton, Texas, studio of Centro-Matic's Matt Pence. They showed up with a pile of demos suspected to be nearly done -- some five years in the making -- but their aspirations evolved in the shadow of the great University of North Texas music school. Reaching out to a professor therein, they wrangled an ace crew of green-and-white gunslingers to exact their wild schemes: a string quartet, an eight-person choir, woodwinds, horns. The whole set was recorded to two-inch tape (no loops), produced by the Wolf brothers, and mixed in Atlanta by Graham Marsh (Cee Lo Green, Katy Perry) with Yoni. Thus every song pops exactly as it should, smearing genre with pointed intent until the end result became an articulated work of unusual artistry and catchiness -- a WHY? record, naturally.'' | |
