not one for a family meal

I listened to rubber traits again and again via a podcast from indiefeed.com. they really rated this album and it is well worth getting. best track 'gemini'. don't put this on volume 1 with the family round a dinner table. get into your own space, turn up the volume and be impressed. could do with being about 4 songs shorter. by track 8 i've had enough else would get more stars.

Something New and Different

Heard the title track of this album on an Indie Alternative show in the Bay Area. Almost crashed writing the title down so I could grab it when I got home. After a few listens of the whole album through you really start to hear the layers of sound these guys can slap together and it's good. There's anticipation in the song when you're wondering what sound they're going to next.

Sugar-sweet melancholy

Before listening to this album, I'd only heard Why?'s contribution to the cLOUDDEAD albums, and to be honest I didn't think that much of his stuff. On this solo* release, however, his approach makes much more sense. The hip-hop beats, such as they were, are all but gone and have been replaced by gorgeous snippets of guitar, piano, glockenspiel and answerphone message, and the overall sound is... well, it's lo-fi indie-pop in the broadest sense, but that doesn't really do it justice. The songs on this album all have a roughly similar sound, so they blend together on the first few listens, but repeated plays reveal a rich, textured song sequence for you to get your teeth into. It's morbid and very sad in places, but at the same time it's quite charming, and rather pretty too. I've had it on repeat play since I downloaded it a couple of weeks ago.

There were some glimmers of articulate clarity and likably wry charm amid the mumblings and meanderings of Why?’s first full-length, Oaklandazulasylum, but they hardly anticipated the dramatic leap forward into approachability that marked their second. (“Their” because, between the two albums, Why? had mutated from an arty quasi-rap solo project alias to a full-fledged if hardly conventional indie rock band) Though still far from easily digestible, the challenges Elephant Eyelash presents aren’t so much about trying to piece together a head-scratchingly oblique, willfully incomplete puzzle as simply taking the time to process and integrate its veritable flood of musical and, especially, lyrical content, an outpouring suggestive of a long-withdrawn, self-absorbed introvert who’s suddenly become desperate to communicate with the world. What gets communicated — in essence, the manifold nooks and crannies of Yoni Wolf’s psyche — is by turns playful, philosophical, insecure, morbid, and sentimental, and while that communication is still happening on Wolf’s own terms — which means reams of voluble verbiage peppered with nerdy absurdities, cleverly convoluted wordplay, and free-associative filigree, usually delivered in a nasal, over-articulated singsong that was really his only viable remaining link to hip-hop (and a pretty tenuous one at that) — the upshot is a singularly striking set of images and insights well worth the scrutiny. Somewhere between intimate journal entries and free-form poetry, these songs float from factual, anecdotal snapshots — like a vivid depiction (in the opening verse of “Sand Dollars”) of watching a water-based graffito dissolve in the rain, or the casual specificity of “Yo Yo Bye Bye”‘s scene-setting opening lines: “I was walking through San Antonio before soundcheck/looking for some pole to do pull-ups on” — to probing meditations on aging and mortality (brooding closers “Act Five” and “Light Leaves”), inscrutable phantasmagoric whimsy (“The Hoofs”), and coded but no-less-heartfelt ruminations on love, loss, memory, and the alarming intensity of human connection (perhaps most affectingly on the wonderfully imagistic “Gemini (Birthday Song).” The subject matter can get fairly weighty, sure, but it’s tempered by Wolf’s deft balance of wit and sincerity, and by the delicately skewed indie pop backing of his bandmates. Indeed, Elephant Eyelash’s music is nearly as remarkable and distinctive as its words; wispy, crunchy, structurally off-kilter compositions that are difficult to classify but favor a certain ramshackle charm and melodic sweetness, and in a few cases — among them “Rubber Traits,” “Gemini,” and especially “Sanddollars” — wind up feeling oddly, downright anthemic. – K. Ross Hoffman

Write a Review8 Member Reviews

Please log in before you review a release. Log in

Almost as good as Alopecia

Sten

... and that says alot. Does this guy every release a bad album? Buy this!

Not Alopecia, but....

fulofunk

Atleast this came before Alopecia, so improvement is always a good thing right? To their credit, I haven't listened to this one nearly as much, but then again there was not a 'The Hollows' song that jumped out, so it will just take more time grow on me.

One of the best.

Superdelegate

This album ends up in my rotation over and over again. It's not possible to describe this disc in words, just get it and hear it, could really change the way you listen to music!