‘You’re confused with what you believe and what you know.  In the dark and distracted.  Now do what you’re told. Indoctrination is crippling all the young and the old’ (Indoctrination)

Mason City’s Why Bother? are nothing if not prolific, averaging two releases a year (all on Feel It) since their 2021 debut album, A Year Of Mutations.  And the real kicker, of course, is that they are so prolific that it fuels rather than dampens their creativity.  Whereas some might fall into a groove of flattening repetition, Why Bother? have come to so intrinsically understand the dynamics of their sound, that every release sees them evolve in intriguing new directions.

The fundamentals remain solid and yet are consistently flexed into eerily atmospheric new shapes.  Lo-fi garage punk is woven through with a decidedly off-kilter pop sensibility.  Then the languidly drawled vocals, hazily hallucinogenic synths, and darkly surreal lyrics shroud proceedings in a surprisingly unsettling gothic reverie.

The cover art – Vanitas by 17^th century painter Philippe de Champaigne – sets the tone perfectly for Case Studies with its spectrally allusive lyrical meditations on mortality, time, and how our understanding of them is shaped by our belief systems.  It is thoroughly evocative journey and as it morphs from the catchily cosmic fuzz of In Between The Distance to the ominously languorous Feeding The Birds, and then the brittle melodicism of Still Remain, it consistently drops a shimmying shoulder to leave our expectations floundering in its wake.