Blog Yoni vs. Gibby: A battle of warped voices

Yoni Wolf's nasal cavities and Gibby Haynes' throat are among the most daunting side channels in all of weird-ass pop music. The frontmen for Why? and Butthole Surfers, respectively, might preside over wildly different sounds, but both voices serve to warn listeners that they're about to have a puzzling, perhaps disorienting experience. With both bands playing in town Tuesday night—Why? at the Union and Butthole Surfers at the Barrymore—The A.V. Club attempts to cushion the vocal-induced alienation by exploring Yoni and Gibby's pipes via a few rough degrees of dissonance.

In the groove
Gibby: On 1987's Locust Abortion Technician, Haynes began running his vocals through a pile of effects he dubbed "Gibbytronix." This often gave him the liberty of wriggling, shrieking, and spewing overtop of the band's toxic discard at will, but on "Graveyard" and "Pittsburgh To Lebanon," two consecutive Locust tracks, he hunkers right down into the grind of the rhythm section. The low-pitched slur on "Graveyard" actually pits some stability against Paul Leary's scab-picking guitar. Haynes rasps through "Pittsburgh To Lebanon" in time with a tortured blues shuffle, before unleashing some ghostly echoes.

Yoni: "21st Century Pop Song" may be the only sugary cut on the Hymie's Basement record (a collaboration between Why? and Fog), but it also serves as a proving ground for Yoni Wolf's ability to encapsulate his surreal rap verses with warped melodic choruses. To Wolf's credit, he rarely spares his signature weirdness when granting the listener some hooks. Extra quirk comes from both the wall-crawling rhythm and the bells that splash over it.

Beastly incoherence
Gibby: The Surfers' next album, Hairway To Steven, opens with "Jimi," a 12-minutes-plus track that gives Haynes ample time to dial through all the malignant circuitry that Gibbytronix has to offer. At first, he seems to be creating a nonsense conversation between a gargling demon and a little kid who just sucked all the helium from a Mylar balloon. But as it goes on, it's as if he's just gaily splashing about in the band's whirlpool of distortion; around the six-minute mark he turns into a cackling alien or something, and during the last eerily peaceful five minutes, the vocals drift off into the distance, gently babbling among the sounds of farm animals.

Yoni: While Haynes challenges listeners with demented rants and hissing sonic abuse, Wolf sometimes nails his audience with shamelessly out-of-key vocals, particularly in the chorus of "Fatalist Palmistry." Sitting in the middle of Why?'s 2008 album Alopecia, this tune is a massive goose-step from the hip-hop influence that has dominated most of Wolf's career (save for Why?'s latest record Eskimo Snow, which has virtually no rapping on it), and the results almost go tumbling off the line between fetching and grating. We congratulate anyone who doesn't feel at least a little embarrassed for Wolf during the nonsensical, off-key warbling in the first half of the chorus. Yet we also can't but be pulled in by the song's overall effect.

Poetic discomfort
Gibby: Even when you can't really hear Haynes' words, or even discernible syllables, you can safely bet they're aggressively confusing. Paradoxically, the Surfers' more straightforward tunes only help to emphasize this mangled word-slop. The chorus of "I Saw An X-Ray Of A Girl Passing Gas" offers imagery that the mind can't really, well, put an image to, unless it's willing to get creative with radiation and the complexities of the GI tract. It raises the question of not just why he'd want to share his medical misadventures with us, but why he'd even want to remember them. Either way, he's apparently connected it all to the JFK assassination: "The one-shot theory got a query, things got rolling at last."

Yoni: Alopecia might be the only Why? album that could put a confused look on Haynes' face. While tunes like "By Torpedo Or Crohn's" and "The Hollows" seem to paint distinct pictures from real-life experiences (i.e. "In Berlin I saw two men fuck in a dark corner of a basketball court / Just the slight jingle of pocket change pulsing"), "Good Friday" seems to combine reality with darker, more surreal ideas via visual lyrics like "Mortaring your earholes shut in a rush with wet coke / In a Starbucks bathroom with the door closed." While he may easily find himself "blowing kisses to disinterested bitches," we'll never understand why he'd be "picking fights on dyke night" or "sucking dick for drink tickets at the free-bar" of his "cousin's Bar Mitzvah."

Approachable
Gibby: Even as the Surfers graduated to Capitol Records and mainstream FM radio in the '90s, "Pepper" (from 1996's Electriclarryland) always opened up a strangely comforting wormhole in any "alt-rock" rotation. Again, a cleaner vocal means the oddness of the words comes to the front as Haynes chants through the verses. ("Flipper died a natural death, he caught a nasty virus / then there was the ever-present football-player rapist.") But on the chorus, the whole band tightens up a dynamic that's more inspired by Revolver than spite and acid. Haynes' strong, swaying vocal melody arcs over the rippling guitars, and "Pepper" remains a kick-ass collision of pop and avant-garde, whether sticklers on either side like it or not.

Yoni: While Wolf is notorious for hiding his emotions amid a seemingly impenetrable fortress of metaphors, some of his most best moments—like in "Gemini (Birthday Song)" from 2005's Elephant Eyelash—happen when his vulnerability slips through the cracks. The nasal medlodies of "Gemini" seem to hint at Wolf's struggles with mortality ("Don't regret the done dirt / There is no life plan set / You just swallow the cold and follow your breath until death), adaptation ("Then the woman passed out in the driver's seat at the order board at White Castle / We woke her up and she went 'round to the pick up window like she knew exactly where she was"), and the impermanence of love. ("I wept with my face in your night shirt / Trying hard as hell to say 'until death separates us' / Loosening the skin on your breastbone, I painted your nails and you sleep while I write all this down.")