Monthly Archives: March 2008

Why? Does Alex Love Alopecia

Hard to say, but I’ll try anyway.
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Why? – Alopecia

Way back in ’03 I came accross Why? (aka Yoni Wolf) after coming accross him via Fog. Over time he and Fog collaborated on Hymie’s Basement then both gradually reinvented themselves from oddball solo artists into band leaders. Now everything has come full circle and Andy Broder (Fog) and Mark Erickson (of Fog’s current band) have collaborated with Why?’s band to produce an utter masterpiece. Much like the excellent album Ditherer Fog put out last year it sees Yoni take his sound and peculiar style and push it to eleven by using the might of a full band and the confidence of a few successful releases behind himself.

I’m very much a lyrics man myself, and Why? does definitely play towards that kind of listener, but also he’s found a way of taking his near monotone delivery and like many of the best rappers taking it as a way of focusing on delivery as well. This is not, in the main, a cheery album, which at least makes it fit with most of his previous work. A good example comes from my favourite track These Few Presidents…

Even though I haven’t seen you in years, yours is a funeral I’d fly to from anywhere

…which gets sung in a laid back breezy style. Looked at in text form the lyrics seem unworkable, but somehow the whole adds much more than you’d imagine. And even if you don’t like the sound of that – check out their cover of Close To Me on their Myspace.

If you're wondering about the name change…

Astute, observant or just plain obsessed readers may well have noticed that after many years of calling this Alex’s Blog I’ve finally decided to change name to nutty’s nuggets. I’d love to claim that this change was precipitated by weeks of research or even some discussion. But no, instead it’s me ignoring what made this happen:

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Above is a chart of my views by week, as you can see 2007 was barely scraping along fed in part thanks to my total lack of blogging at times. Then I made my annual blog about music of the year a month early. As of today that post has had 1,078 views on the site here, more than 10 times the next most popular post which is merely a couple of linked Gondry youtube clips. Now I think some of what caused that success was calling the blog Alex’s Blog which made it float up to the top of largeheartedboy‘s roundup which fed me nearly 1,000 of those 1,078 views! However, I’ve come to the conclusion that if I’m going to get linked elsewhere I should have a snappier name hence nutty’s nuggets, which at least is as endearingly rubbish as my site design.

On an interesting side note, I was also linked from and had my data scraped for Hype Machine’s 2007 roundup, which includes their rather nice visual version of my top 10 albums of 2007, which they explain a bit in their own blog.

Anyone who’s been following the blog since then, don’t panic!, musical content here will ramp up as I get off my arse to go to gigs and as the new albums by Devotchka, Misty’s Big Adventure and Madness turn up…