Why?- Bristol Thekla

Yoni Wolf is on fiery form tonight. The last time I caught Why? was a performance within the confines of a sweltering London club in mid-July. The walls dripping with their own cool sweat and the musicians on stage visibly wilting in the heat, the show felt strangely introspective. A little odd perhaps for a band whose singer has made his name laying bare the kind of personal confessions most would cringe at revealing to close friends, let alone the world at large. This evening, on a boat in the middle of Bristol, the contrast couldn’t be greater. Wolf is relaxed and at ease onstage, pulling superman shapes and dropping everything for an acerbic freestyle that serves as a potent reminder of his hip-hop background. It could have been the lower temperature and airier space, but perhaps it’s more that he’s finally beginning to grow into his skin as frontman. It’s a welcome development either way: his is music that relies on the knowledge of shared experience.

So opener ‘These Few Presidents’ is perfectly pitched. On record a gut-wrenchingly told story of a close friend’s suicide, managing to avoid using that dreaded word and relying on implication alone, tonight it’s stripped back and rawer in tone. The effect is to imbue the song with the humour and wit that it’s possible to miss on record. The same is true of ‘Good Friday’, raised from its deadpan telling on Alopecia to blistering and acidic, Wolf practically spitting his lyrics onto the front two rows. For a frontman whose sincerity can quite easily be misconstrued as over-earnest, Wolf’s live persona is disarmingly self-effacing and relaxed. To these ears, Why?’s most recent record Eskimo Snow lacked a little of the bite of its two predecessors, but tonight even songs that had been easy to dismiss acquire a sheen of grit and reality quite unlike that of their recorded counterparts. It’s this aspect that makes it easier than ever to get lost in the spiralling Philip Glass-isms of ‘A Sky For Shoeing Horses Under’ and the softly plucked guitar figure of intentionally muted closer ‘Crushed Bones’, Wolf dropping his nasal whine for a mature baritone strikingly at odds with his manic delivery.

Words : Rory Gibb
Photography : Frankie Buttons