Revisit other SputStaff Top 10 Lists:

| Bon Iver | Kanye West | Mastodon | My Chemical Romance |

| The National | Say Anything | Taylor Swift | Thrice |

Foreword:

We’ve arrived at our ninth installment of this wonderful little series, which happens to land on a group that has recently (and amicably) disbanded. mewithoutYou developed a cult following early in their career with A to B: Life and Catch For Us The Foxes before 2006’s Brother, Sister turned them into key players in the indie-rock/post-hardcore scenes. As the band pushed into the latter years of their career, they delivered some of their strongest material with the apocalyptic Pale Horses and the emotionally unhinged [Untitled] LP. Throughout their existence, they always delivered music that meant something. Frontman Aaron Weiss wielded his pen masterfully for two decades, in the process curating a world that often felt like it blurred the line between the playfully imaginary and sobering reality. In a way celebrating the life of this poetic and emotive vessel, the staff here at Sputnikmusic have created a list of the ten best mewithoutYou songs. We hope you enjoy.

Honorable Mentions:

15. Messes of Men

14. Magic Lantern Days

13. The Fox, the Crow, and the Cookie

12. Fox’s Dream of the Log Flume

11. Wolf Am I! (And Shadow)

Sputnik Staff Top 10 mewithoutYou Songs:

(10) “January, 1979”

from Catch For Us the Foxes (2004)

“January 1979” ain’t no On Kawara painting: mewithoutYou would like you very kindly to feel the full force of that whole month for whichever palimpsest-narrator-character Weiss dreamed up. The guitars rush toward you like the ocean’s roar; the crash cymbal hardly gets a rest. Shit’s a movie.

I get shivers every time I hear Aaron Weiss yell-sing “My ear pressed against the pass like a glass on a wall of a hospital photograph,” because the line sounds really cool and pushes the sordid psychological narrative forward and he rhymes syllables 7 10 19 and no others and for some reason the big pause between syllables 10 and 19 sounds really cool. I also get shivers when Aaron Weiss sings “Oh, someone make me afraid of what I’ve become” and I cognize the distance the line implies between its narrator’s sober recognition of his own lousiness and his ability to care about it. I get shivers when I hear the words “If I could be your servant,” which alternate lines with just-plain “I could be your servant”. It makes me shiver to think that this guy could be vacillating between an offer and a fantasy, that the fantasy and the offer are to quit life and become someone’s servant, and that he’s not even sure he’ll get an affirmative answer–that he might lose out on his fantasy of quitting life and be punished by instead having to live it. Life is pain, mewithoutYou teach us.

But also more. Some music is like a positive feedback system and serves to underline or highlight the mood the listener was already in, to enhance or emphasize it through its aesthetic qualities; some music, by contrast, is more like a negative feedback system and serves to work against its own sad sonic or lyrical grain by making someone happy or makes someone sad even though it seems like it should be happy. The same song can at different times be both positive and negative in this sense, indeed. But I think there’s something “negative” (not as in pessimistic) about mewithoutYou’s music at its core: I think their music serves to make the world less painful through letting you revel in how painful it is. mewithoutYou, like their name implies, labor to chart the consciousness of someone (“me”) who has lost someone else (“You”). Weird though it is to say, I think the vividness and motion and specificity of Weiss and co.’s chart of the spiritually and materially bereaved mind and soul serves ultimately if not above all to make us less sad–mewithoutYou, as if by magic, make it so that they can be, in a big though not comprehensive way, the “You” to the listener’s “me”. I may not be spiritual but I believe in mewithoutYou. –robertsona

(9) “Nine Stories”

from Ten Stories (2012)

For all their intricate metaphors and wry humour, the chief reason mewithoutYou have held out as one of my favourite bands is their uncannily firm grasp on the most typically invisible nuances of the most intangible spiritual baggage. Their best work grapples with this headlong, in whichever form – Catch For Us The Foxes with the struggle of surrendering one’s despairs and desires to all-enveloping faith, Pale Horses with the turbulence of a new marriage, the grief of a dead father, the ever-crumbling foundation of self-faith in a dying world – but if there’s a single moment in their canon that acts as a locus for doubt and disaffection, it’s “Nine Stories”‘ unlikely allegory of a cosmopolitan Owl and an incorrigibly dour Walrus. Short story: Owl’s trove of chipper anecdotes and worldly experiences are of no consolation to ol’ pal Walrus, whose defeatism and death instincts are alive and pointed straight at an ideal of heaven that, shock horror, the two don’t share in the slightest. In a glorious lead balloon of a denouement that sees the track’s perky compound time abruptly elongated into the glummest 4/4 you ever did hear, Jacob’s ladder finds itself erected towards salvation and promptly inverted straight back to earth in a daunting symbol of exhausted aspirations. Trumpets blare melodiously. It’s not quite a “Rainbow Signs”-esque apocalypse-of-the-individual, but boy oh boy can you hear that song just over the horizon.

Sowhat’sitallmean? Dunno. That’s your legwork. What it illustrates is a horrifyingly clear sense of how it feels to walk this wretched earth with a iron-cast of understanding of where you sit within it but not the faintest shred of conviction over what any of it’s truly worth or where any of its paths ultimately lead. It’s devastating, and its many comic flourishes only accentuate its underlying despair. mewithoutYou are extraordinary at adding colour, contour and weight to the most greyscale soul-encumbering vacuums; “Nine Stories” is perhaps the heaviest song they ever sang. I am very glad that it acquired the ninth place on this list. –JohnnyoftheWell

(8) “The King Beetle on a Coconut Estate”

from It’s All Crazy! It’s All False! It’s All A Dream! It’s Alright! (2009)

There are few lyricists on the face of the earth who could make the line “why not be utterly changed into fire?” sound hauntingly appealing. Then again, there are few in general who deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as Aaron Weiss, undoubtedly one of the best of his generation. In the absence of any more words from Aaron’s golden pen – for the foreseeable future, or possibly ever – a good coping mechanism is to look back on the likes of “King Beetle on a Coconut Estate”. Weiss spins an entire fable out of beetle royalty, overconfident professors and ambitious lieutenants, all struggling to come to terms with the fact that their lives will end the same as yours, mine or anyone’s. May we all go as gracefully as the Beetle King, flying headlong into a bug zapper in search of the unknown, utterly changed into fire. –Rowan

(7) “In a Sweater Poorly Knit”

from Brother, Sister (2006)

Much like with ‘King Beetle’, there should be something sad, even tragic about the conclusion of ‘Sweater’. Perhaps not for Weiss or the Narrator or the Believer of God, for whom the ‘trap’ – like the ‘fire’ – is dangerous, but good and necessary. For the non-believer, though? For the no-longer-believing? If there’s no I, and there’s no You, what is there? And yet, ‘Sweater’ doesn’t feel sad. And it doesn’t feel tragic. It feels cathartic, life-affirming. And so call that what you will. Call it simply Good Music at the Right Time. Call it Weiss’s ability to persuade – that perhaps there’s something more to life, whether that’s God or music whatever. Call it the magic of mewithoutYou: the music its collisions make. –BlushfulHippocrene

(6) “Mexican War Streets”

from Pale Horses (2015)

Of every fine track on this fine list, I’ll wager “Mexican War Streets” is by a decent margin among the roughest to pin down in prose (look who’s a sucker for volunteering) – it’s a real ugly duckling, following on from “D-Minor” in a jagged unpacking of Aaron Weiss’ fresh marriage and, nothing ever being as it seems with our dear man, the inner and interspousal rifts that accompanied it. Or so I think – it took me a long time to unpick it as such, because the anger in this piece is twisted, vindictive and seductively packaged in morbid Russian modernist references like nothing else in the mewithoutYou canon; while the context of those words is evasive and impenetrable, the emotional resonance of its knockout lines is most certainly not (figured that’d get rid of you / waited with a stone in my hand / but […] nature had another plan / and FAILED TO RUN IT BY ME // you panic like a mouse when the lights go on / I admit it warms my heart / to watch your world fall apart). This, one can’t help but wonder, is what the resentment and fury of the band’s scatty debut might have looked like with a little maturity behind it, and it’s an uncomfortably stirring experience. Good thing the track veers into an extended outro that, if not exactly more existentially contended than its opening minutes, at least complements their scorched earth with a much-needed comedown. I’m still catching my breath just thinking about them. –JohnnyoftheWell

(5) “O, Porcupine”

from Brother, Sister (2006)

“O, Porcupine” deserves to make this list for exactly one second where absolutely nothing happens. One would be hardpressed to find a song where a moment of silence that is as impactful what occurs when Aaron Weiss implores us all to listen to everything. It’s a powerful and overwhelming moment, one that calls for equal parts intro- and extro- spection. The moment fits perfectly well on “O, Porcupine” because if I try too hard to think about the full meaning of the song, I get overwhelmed. It’s both saying that everything and nothing is God, it is full of hidden and blatant religious allegories, it is deeply personal to Weiss and perhaps the most (literally) universal song that I have ever heard. How do you try to fit the obtuse answer of how the world was created and who created it and who created us into a four and a half minute song? The answer that mewithoutYou came up with is to use every musical tool possible to make the sound as all-encompassing as possible while still somehow feeling intimate, even as it explodes into one of their harshest and heaviest moments towards the end. The choice of the silence, the ironic dissonance, the hand drums in the bridge – It is mewithoutYou doing what they do best, which is creating music that no one can, taking risks no other band would dare, and turning it into a masterpiece. “O, Porcupine” is overwhelming and intimidating in every sense while somehow, against all odds, feeling warm and safe and comfortable at the same time, mostly because it’s nice to know you’re not alone with these thoughts. –dmathias52

(4) “Julia (Or, ‘Holy To The LORD’ On The Bells Of Horses)”

from [Untitled] (2018)

There wasn’t any way that Julia (Or, ‘Holy To The LORD’ On The Bells Of Horses) was going to miss inclusion on this list. Mouthful of a title and all, this one’s the iconic and accessible jam of mewithoutYou’s acclaimed final album, and undoubtedly among the group’s defining songs. Replete with the band’s signature complex but appealing lyrics (“safely on the shore we sank like stones, to the bottom of a made-up ocean”, etc.) and a rocking musical accompaniment which practically demands the listener’s head to start nodding along, who could ask for more? –Sunnyvale

(3) “Bear’s Vision of St. Agnes”

from Ten Stories (2012)

Ten Stories has, over the years, subtly worked its way right to the top of my mewithoutYou favourites. If I’m honest, it has everything to do with the tragedy of Fox and Bear, an imaginary friendship between two talking animals which nonetheless moves me more than most real ones. The final moments of “Bear’s Vision of St. Agnes” – Bear’s final thoughts as he plummets to his death, a sacrifice so his friend might live – are gutwrenching, and absurdly sad for an album that was cracking knead/dough puns not one song earlier. But a circle has to depart to come around again, or so I’m told; so too do we have to tell a story to its end before it can begin again, like Fox creating new life from the ending of his friend’s, like me spinning Ten Stories again and again knowing always how it will end. –Rowan

(2) “Rainbow Signs”

from Pale Horses (2015)

No song that I’ve heard captures the intersection of religious and secular apocalypse like ‘Rainbow Signs’ does. The lyrics depict scenes straight out of the Bible’s book of Revelation — replete with a blackened sun and four horsemen — but with the added dread of impending nuclear holocaust (“No more water, is the H-Bomb next time?”). That imagery alone is terrifying, but when you factor in the searing riffs and Aaron Weiss’ urgent screams which comprise the song’s breakdown, it all comes together to form what is likely the most bone-chilling moment in mewithoutYou’s entire catalog. This track’s real magic, however, isn’t in its horrifying account of Earth’s final hours; it’s in Weiss’ ability to retain a piece of his identity amid the chaos — a joke shared between him and his late father from many years ago. “Let’s keep that silly punchline between me and you” he sings, as if clutching onto a gem. Some things — a smile, a fleeting moment of endearment — can’t be erased. –Sowing

(1) “Red Cow/Dorothy”

from Pale Horses (2015)

It may feel like a cop out to have a merged duo of songs selected as mewithoutYou’s best track, a decision to be defended both by noting the diminutive nature of “Dorothy” and the fact that the two tracks were released together as a single. Nonetheless, it’s ultimately fitting that this pair emerged on top. After all, “Red Cow” and “Dorothy” together represent definitively the dichotomy which propelled the band to their greatest heights: “Red Cow” with the aggression and angst fueled by the group’s post-hardcore roots, “Dorothy” with the milder indie and folk influences which crept extensively into their later works. Together, they’re a master class: “Red Cow” is, simply put, an absolute banger, but also a demonstration of Aaron Weiss’ off-kilter brilliant lyricism (“Was he a violent man? Well, he had his genocidal moments”…), meanwhile “Dorothy” is touching to a degree inverse of its slim runtime, featuring immensely personal musings culminating in the Biblical “eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani”. One could make a solid case that either track stands alone as mewithoutYou’s best, together they’re hard to dethrone. –Sunnyvale

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