WHY? Camp Out Comfortably on The Well I Fell Into

Indie pop pioneer Yoni Wolf is camping out at the summit of his craft with The Well I Fell Into, the eighth studio album from his shapeshifting ensemble WHY?. The record houses a handful of brilliant tracks, yet the maturity and precision it’s built with sometimes guides the music into safer, more familiar waters. While WHY? is known to push the needle, here the band sounds keen on reinventing the wheel. If the songs on 2008’s Alopecia felt innovative, then the ones on The Well I Fell Into arrive more like a collection of freshly tumbled gems made without having to chip away into any sort of new ground.

The peaks of The Well I Fell Into outshine its valleys, with standouts like early cut “G-dzilla G’dolah” posed like some lost soundtrack for a heartfelt kaiju jukebox musical. It’s a classic pop song with retro influences and lyrics like “G-dzilla / It’s tearing me up / You’re burning me down / And my whole damn town” that’ll get stuck in your head with aggressive catchiness. It’s like a mad scientist’s bizarre attempt at writing a commercially successful lead single, one which just might have been a hit on the UK charts back in the early ‘80s.

The hallucinogenic world-building of Wolf’s words is often artful without pretense, painting nostalgic slides of the everyday mundane. The lyrics on “What’s Me?” show but never tell on its suburban liminality, with lines like “Parked in front of a haunted house / Midnight or there about / With a girl in a tiara crown / And her mama’s old wedding gown,” that gives a voyeuristic peek into a stranger’s timeline. Some of the album’s drug-like strangeness helps make songs like “What’s Me?” feel especially fresh.

And while the album’s psychedelia can sound effortless, the execution of the group’s hip-hop influences doesn’t work quite as well here as it did on 2005’s unclassifiable Elephant Eyelash. One of these missteps is on the track “When We Do The Dance,” which attempts to be both edgy and esoteric with lyrics like “I want to bust into your great great grandmother’s uterus.” It’s a confession about the urge to send a celestial load into its subject’s ancestor to connect their generations at the root. Let’s just say verses like this one likely read a bit differently than intended. Possibly poetic satire, it still comes across as dated, or worse, a bit out of touch.

A breakup album at its core, The Well I Fell Into works in emotional confession. The thesis track “Marigold” is heartbreaking, with lyrics about the death of a marriage that are some of the strongest on the record. “I used to be married / Now I drag around the ring / On a sling / In a barrel of salt,” Wolf wails jarringly as if no one is listening, following with “She gave me her 20s / Gave her a painting / By my mother / Of a couple of marigolds.” It’s brave and honest to admit that the trade wasn’t fair, and that no one really wins. The more devastating depths of the album evoke the faint memory of Mount Eerie’s own eighth release A Crow Looked At Me. While Phil Elverum revealed the emotional catastrophe of losing a wife to cancer, a similar echo of loss can be felt in Wolf’s The Well I Fell Into. It is a different and incomparable way to lose a spouse, but both still linger in the unavoidable pain of a partner who’s vanished.

On “Jump,” Wolf sings, “I need a fucking jump man / I need something / I need a fucking jump.” Could “jump” refer to needing a rhetorical boost; a brave admission of personal struggle? Is it a request for drugs, or maybe even a death wish? It ultimately doesn’t matter; any of these options are still an admirable call for help from songwriters being generous with their private lives. “Jump” is one of many standout moments of clarity and maturity across the album. This same sense of maturity also has some of this project feeling somewhat stuck in the past. Unlike the welcome experimentalism showcased on WHY?’s previous record AOKOHIO, here they sound more like legends of 2000s indie doing what feels comfortable. While genre subversion is still present throughout, they do it in ways audiences have come to expect of Yoni Wolf and friends. To spend thirty years innovating is enough to ask of an artist. Still, I think WHY? are more than capable of digging into new terrain and creating something more unexpected.

Also, lyrical attempts to stay timeless sometimes have the opposite effect. On the lovely track “Sending Out a Pamphlet,” lines like”I’m sending out a pamphlet for my love / With the caption “This Could Be Us” / The image on the front page fucks / Devil and Angel do a foxtrot in a shadowbox” come across showing its age like Steve Buscemi in the fellow kids meme. Yet the music beneath the words conjures up a much more compelling vision of Buscemi, his character Seymour in Ghost World, lonely yet content in his apartment, listening to obscure jazz records.

It’s hard not to expect a little bit extra from a group like WHY?, who have repeatedly proven themselves to be pioneers across the past few decades. While their long-awaited eighth album might not be the most inventive release of an already-prolific career, it’s still a product of artists who are obviously real masters of their craft. With moments of profound devastation and perches of inviting psychedelia, The Well I Fell Into respectfully showcases the cozy cottage WHY? has built for themselves at the top of the mountain.