Why?
Festsaal Kreuzberg, Berlin
2
nd July, 2009
Festsaal Kreuzberg, the venue for tonight’s return of Why? to Berlin, is a cosy place in winter but a bread oven in summer. It’s the same across most of the city. Berlin can’t handle its heat. A few 30 degree days, thick with humidity, and the place feels like living in a pair of lungs, concrete towers exhaling heat through day and night. People flock to parks to escape it, green spots colonised with djembes, dreadlocks and grill parties (i.e. barbeques). At Festsaal, everyone stands in the outside courtyard until the last possible moment, the doorway jamming with people at the first thump of a kick drum.
It was always going to be a tough gig, then, to play support on a warm night like this. Nevertheless, local opener
Glass & Fishes managed to pull in a sizeable semi-circle of an audience. A one-man band, he flitted between guitar, loop pedals, laptop, keyboard and drums. The pairing of tonight’s bill made sense as he begun to add beats to his shoegaze atmospherics and lo-fi song craft. Both Glass & Fishes and Why? are indie acts who’ve passed through other genres, drawing in strong elements from places further afield. Glass & Fishes parse Kraftwerk, shoegaze, Robert Pollard and ambient music to arrive at something that’s not quite original, but sometimes striking. It’s somewhat reminiscent of the similarly influenced, excellent UK act
Sleeping States. On the same stage in the middle of an icy winter, the audience huddled on the floor, this may draw us in. However, most of the energy coming from the stage tonight is nervousness and the mumbled lyrics dissolve in the humidity, dripping to the floor.
Shirts stuck to our backs, Why? take the stage. It’s immediately apparent that, like Hot Chip, the dynamics and presence of the band’s live show is more engaging than the records—perhaps because the ostentatiously
clever nature of the lyrics and songwriting is here felt less than the pulse and groove of live drums, bass, vibraphone, guitar and Rhodes, with the trace elements of dub giving it a welcome throb.
The members each range across a number of instruments. Delivering his intricate lyrics, Yoni Wolf also shakes a large yellow maraca (a la, yes, Hot Chip) and picks up drum sticks to pound along from time to time. Drummer—and elder brother—Josiah Wolf handles the main percussion duties, switching from kit to vibraphone and back again. Josiah handles back-up harmonies with Doug McDiarmid—sometime keyboardist, sometime guitarist, sometime bassist—to lend the band some of its melodic hooks. Austin Brown, a touring member of the band, takes the majority of the bass duties with quiet enthusiasm but also nails a few songs on guitar.
All this, of course, is of a piece with the indie predilection for the live rendition of hip-hop over the MC & DJ format. Yet the ambiguity of Why? is their relationship to both indie rock and hip-hop. The crowd is indie heavy. The lyrical material, too, is of an indie provenance, a litany of images reminiscent of others who deal in the strange minutiae of everyday life, the nostalgia and animosity of suburban youth; a meeting point for ironic McSweeney’s short stories, Nicholson Baker’s mundane neuroses and David Berman’s character studies. (Without, it must be said, ever quite matching the quality of Baker or Berman—although Wolf namechecks Berman’s group, Silver Jews.) But the delivery is undeniably hip-hop in inspiration—it is the wordiest form of popular music, after all, and lyricist Yoni Wolf has a lot of stories to tell.
Nevertheless, while hip-hop laces the band’s playing and sound—and the group has roots in acts like cLOUDDEAD and is released by Anticon—tonight is a reminder of how far the band has drifted into the realms of art-pop; tethered to hip-hop, like an inflatable gorilla floating above a car dealer, they feel like they’re pulling at the end of that leash. In the live setting, the playing is looser than their last studio LP,
Alopecia, sometimes landing in rock-out territory. You might call this prog hip-hop (prog-hop? hip-prog? hip-prog-hop?), switching tempos and moods and keys within the space of a song.
In trying conditions, the audience and band respond a little less readily than they may have otherwise. The hookier tracks from
Alopecia deliver a few peaks, but the less-than-capacity crowd keeps it fairly subdued throughout. Nevertheless, it’s a strong performance from a band tweaking elements of backpack hip-hop and indie rock.
Ben Gook