Jul/090
LIVE: Why?
The blurb:
It’s whiteboy indie-hop, playing live at the Garage in Highbury.
Sounds like:
Buck 65 with less of the gravelly voice and more skinny jeans.
Thoughts:
Hip-hop is not somthing I “do”. I have to admit to having preconceived ideas about unnecessarily offensive men mumbling about “biatches” which definitely turns me off the genre. However when I was in Canada some years ago I picked up a record with a nice cover (always a good technique for finding random music) which was Secret House Against the World by Buck 65. Here was a raw piece of work, with a particularly harrowing track about domestic abuse delivered in a wonderfully direct spoken word way. “Wow, hip-hop aint all bling!”, I thought. Guns = bad, angst = clearly a good thing, right?
So my eyes were opened up somewhat by that chance encounter although I haven’t explored the (yes I’m going to say it again) indie-hop avenue much since then. So, apparently Why? are a very “in” band at the moment. Indeed, the recently re-opened Garage in Highbury was full of skinny jeans, Converse and checked trucker shirts. I didn’t let my lack of 50s revival hair-do spoil my evening, however, and once Why? were on stage it was clear this was not just a haircut band.
Their frontman Jonathan “Yoni” Wolf clearly has great rhythm, bashing away with a small selection of percussion while delivering his lines poker-faced into the crowd. Although the few more traditional (and wonderfully arranged) indie rock tracks go down well, the crowd are here for the smart dry rhymes of big hitters like By Torpedo or Crohn’s. Highlight of the night had to be the perfect execution of the short and snappy glockenspiel-led A Sky for Shoeing Horses Under: “when I’m eyed I tongue my bottom teeth / and look at the sidewalk in front of me / as my tennis shoes go in and out of the frame”. Lovely stuff.
Verdict:
Hip to the hop. I’ll probably be exploring their label anticon in some more detail.
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