Mumps, etc.
Whether the result of taking an unusually long time off between records or not, on WHY?'s fourth album, Yoni Wolf has sunk even further into himself, but not to discover some sort of deeper truth about the human condition. Mumps, etc. is an often unlistenably solipsistic, lazy album from a band that was often excellent.
There’s a song on Why?’s 2003 album, Oaklandazulasylum, called “Bad Entropy.” It’s no career high for Why?, which at the time was a solo project for Jonathan “Yoni” Wolf, but it has all the elements that first made the band so arresting: home-recorded hip-hop drum breaks, soft keys, and shy pop production. Wolf’s…
"Good God / what the hell, what the fuck?" raps Yoni Wolf, WHY?'s heady mischief-maker, minutes into his band's fourth…
Mumps, Etc. doesn't entirely break new ground in any of those areas, except perhaps the latter -- beyond the now-familiar layers of keyboards and mallet percussion, they called in orchestral musicians and a choir to further flesh out the album's sonics.
Alopecia and Eskimo Snow saw WHY? distance themselves from the hip-hop template that defined their earlier albums as Yoni Wolf’s neurotic drawl played second fiddle to his nasally croon. And while the results were often excellent, it’s exhilarating to hear the band return to their roots on Mumps, etc. The record is brilliantly produced and sequenced; instrumentation is rich and ornate (heavenly harps and ethereal bells abound) and the pace of proceedings, with a rapped number often followed by a sung one, helps it gel fantastically.
Thanks to a bunch of swanky production-value-boosting additions-a string quartet, a choir, a horn section-Mumps, etc. sounds like a much bigger-budget album than its humble predecessors.