Review Summary: "I do not exist, am not an entity in this world or in the next, did not descend from Adam and Eve or any origin story. My place is placeless, a trace of the traceless. Neither body or soul."
“After our third album, that album begins and ends with lyrics ‘I do not exist’. That to me is the culmination of my deepest spiritual wrestling and pursuit. That still to me is still to me the pinnacle of where I said the deepest sense of my conviction or my intention to my hopes for my own sense of identity. Anything I’ve written since then has been an elaboration of that.”
-Aaron Weiss, 2016, interview with Zero Platoon.
The moment mewithoutYou truly comes to fruition as a band is found within the first chords of Messes of Men. Until the opening seconds of Brother, Sister, there was something still entirely atonal about mewithoutYou. The band, sans Aaron, has always been a tight, remarkable unit, and in many ways, they’re the saving grace for Aaron Weiss, a passionate but unremarkable presence on their first record, and a unique, thrilling, but still troubling discordant presence on their second. It’s an atonality that presents itself in a few different aspects. Aaron, within Catch us for the Foxes, still comes off as one-dimensional, his spoken style often not finding room to breathe. Aaron can come off as monotonous, with the burden ending up on the band to create tension and space. Certainly, Son of a Widow flirts with what mewithoutYou will find in Messes of Men, but it’s a little shy, a little unsure, a modest closing to Catch us for the Foxes. But even moreso, the discordance is found within the mindset of Aaron Weiss himself. AB-Life is an ungraceful pining for his ex-lover that awkwardly shoehorns itself into some spiritual lesson. Catch us for the Foxes is authentic, affecting and earnest, but Aaron’s reflection on his own depression and desire to not be still has an ugliness and a bluntness which is ill-fitting for the grace he is seeking to reflect.
Brother, Sister is as much a culmination of mewithoutYou’s first two albums as it is a repudiation of them. Understanding but in judgment of Aaron’s passions in AB-Life and downright embarrassed of Catch us for the Foxes – which is recognizably now a decrying of ego wrapped up entirely in ego, finally Aaron Weiss has come of age, stumbling upon the spiritual truth he’s been circling around this entire time. “I do not exist, we faithfully insist,” Aaron Weiss opines in the first lyric of the album, entirely disputing in the opening minute everything he formed before (how can one exist but insist?). It’s not all about him. The separation this new approach causes is subtle – but it will come to define the entirety of mewithoutYou’s mid-career. Simply put – Aaron Weiss begins to wink.
Messes of Men is just as intense as any of mewithoutYou songs, but it’s slightly more knowing, and in a first for the band, it’s actually playful. The subtle sound of waves and faint bass lines come to the forefront, a soft but impressive approach for a band that has only really ever viewed music with a sense of needed bombast. And certainly that comes, as Aaron finishes singing the first verse. That’s right –singing - confidently and unashamed. And as Michael Weiss’s by now trademark lead guitar comes crashing into Weiss’s newly introduced acoustic guitar, post-hardcore blends into folk and still sounds entirely distinctive of mewithoutYou without being anything quite like what they’ve done before. The climax doesn’t come in screams or musical interlude but rather through a three second-group chorus before the band picks up the wreckage of the song and concludes it with the instrumental interplay that made Catch us for the Foxes so distinctive. It’s perhaps the most monumental moment one will find the first time working through this band’s discography. Really, it’s one of Aaron’s first fully formed songs, where he finds an almost pop-sensibility in melody and marries it seamlessly to the hardcore style the band had found before. It opens an entirely new range of possibilities for the band, one the band wastes no time in exploring fully in the album to come. It might be the most stunning moment in Brother, Sister, but it’s one of many, many to come in the album ahead.
Melody has almost a stimulant effect on mewithoutYou’s music, making their heavy moments more driving and impacting as they blend into the various moods and colors the band is now able to create. The interplay between the band’s two sides is always present here, and even the songs that harken most back to mewithoutYou’s first two albums are more complete here than they were before, the contrast and symmetry between the two sides of the band’s sound blending to make the band’s most explosive moments. But it’s the moments of whimsy that stand out most to me here. The single horn blast in C-Minor, never to be heard again. The musical interludes in O’Porcupine, breaking the musical fourth wall. The spider interludes, philosophical folk ditties that section the album into organized segments, cement the meaning of the album, but mostly just don’t take themselves all too seriously. There are moments all over the album where a sense of wit is found, it’s subtle, never overdone, and really speaks to the amount of confidence Weiss has found as a songwriter.
And it’s not just musically. If AB-Life and Catch us for the Foxes cast Aaron in the vein of Old Testament prophets, Brother, Sister removes the ashes and sackcloth and plays to a tradition which made the New Testament so revolutionary. Aaron Weiss begins speaking in parables. It certainly plays into the new vibrancy and cleverness the band has found musically – “A Glass Can Only Spill What It Contains” comes to mind, which features Aaron relaying accounts of animals who think they are far too clever but fail to be clever at all within the song - but it also serves it’s traditional role. Aaron’s newfound detachment from his personal troubles allows him to share spiritual truths through metaphor and story – allowing him to portray a peace and wisdom entirely distinctive from what his records have portrayed before. Most importantly though, it allows him to fully find his artistic merit as a songwriter, penning lyrics rich in meaning, literary merit and wit. Just as mewithoutYou’s music has found a new dimension in sound, Aaron’s lyrics has found a new dimension as well.
Certainly, it’s curious that as far removed as this sounds from AB – Life, it’s also an album that is entirely connected to it. From the spider interludes directly mirroring the (A) and (B) interludes of the first album, to the several references to the ex-lover that was the entire focus of AB-Life that suddenly re-emerge on this album. It’s not a re-treading of old ground but Aaron Weiss looking back on his life with a new understanding. Nice and Blue part 2 is a direct response to Nice and Blue (Part 1) within AB-Life. But again, there’s Aaron Weiss’s wink at the closing moments of the song where he directly quotes lyrics from the first song, changing “in the clarity of such grace, remember me” to “forget all about me”, again rebuking the truths he thought he found in previous works.
It all comes to a head on mewithoutYou’s masterpiece, A Sweater Poorly Knit. Mirroring Messes of Men, A Sweater Poorly Knit is again a driving folk song, sharp in melody and imagery. The song follows the same exact narrative sweep of AB-Life, comparing Aaron’s yearning to his ex-lover to his yearning for God, and at the same time chases the same philosophical ends as Catch us for the Foxes, yearning for the abolishment of self. But as the song comes to a close and that line “I do not exist” comes to the forefront once again, it’s not the result of searching or intention or insistence. To not exist is to simply be, it is to recognize that your meaning comes from your relation to the divine and your relation to others and the unimportance that you have as an individual compared to the two. And as the phrase turns into a chant, another mood enters into mewithoutYou’s music, one which will come to represent the climaxes of mewithoutYou’s next two records as well, one of celebration and rejoice. mewithoutYou almost enters into a musical and philosophical nirvana in the moment, a moment of transcendence and enlightenment. All the philophiscal searching Weiss has done in the past three records comes to a close in one single statement, reflected by the peaceful plucking of the harp as the album closes. It will always be mewithoutYou’s trademark moment, in records and on-stage, which often occurs with Aaron singing the line hoarse as audience members suddenly crash onto the stage behind him. It’s fitting and appropriate. A closing chapter to mewithoutYou.
But unless you’re Jeff Mangum, a musical career isn’t that neat, and as is human, Aaron Weiss will spend some time reveling in this new spiritual contentment, particularly in the headscratching and delightful “It’s all Crazy…” the band will pen next, before descending back down to his ego, his humanness, his fragility and his doubt. That descent will create moments more nuanced, more complex and more meaningful, and will craft Aaron Weiss into a songwriter both more fragile and more powerful.
But Brother, Sister will always indeed be the climax to mewithoutYou’s discography, where the band truly does reach enlightenment in both form and sound, and I find the more I burrow into mewithoutYou’s music, the more I come to appreciate and revere the record. And, the more I come to explore music as a whole, the more I am convinced that no other record will challenge the perch on which this accomplishment sits. This is mewithoutYou’s unquestioned masterpiece, and it is unparalleled to anything created before or after.
