Review Summary: “Run from what's comfortable. Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious. I have tried prudent planning long enough. From now on I'll be mad.”
I got into a long conversation with a fellow fan of this band a few weeks back about why Aaron Weiss’s lyrics just didn’t make sense anymore. It’s not a conclusion I agree with but it’s one I honor. If “Brother, Sister” is when Aaron Weiss finds his nirvana and “It’s All Crazy” represents the afterglow, "Ten Stories" is when the dream starts to fall apart. There’s simplicity in every mewithoutYou album leading up to this, a clarity, a philosophical point, a clear motivation. I posited in my "Brother, Sister" review that Aaron Weiss began to follow the New Testament tact of using parables, simple stories to illustrate moral and spiritual truths. But in Ten Stories, the sole parables is anything but simple – I’ve listened to this album faithfully for six years now and still have trouble establishing any kind of coherent narrative from its host of disparate animal adventures. The spiritual truths presented in these tales are suddenly, at best, murky, Aaron’s confidence in them more than wavering.
Ten Stories is both an entirely disjointed and entirely cohesive work simultaneously, and in some ways, it feels like mewithoutYou’s least consequential work and in many other ways, it’s one of their best. Coming off the queer and zany orchestral campfire folk of “It’s all Crazy…” Ten Stories is somewhat a return to form for the band who have amalgamated the melodic hardcore they found in Brother, Sister with the celebratory exercises of “It’s All Crazy…” and just a touch of the morose soon to be found in spades in Pale Horses. But this is far away from the apocalyptic rumblings of that album. While, at best, the tales here lean towards philosophical skepticism, and at worst, veer towards straight nihilism, what’s found at its auditory cornerstones are outbursts of melody and near joy. It certainly helped matters that Aaron starts to dip his toe into hardcore again, the opening of "February 1878" opens the record in a gust of fresh air, Aaron once again screaming over driving distortion, before spiraling to a dense melodic conclusion the band would have been incapable of before the adventures of “It’s All Crazy…” From then on, it’s a showcase of how versatile, confident and mature the band has become. “Grist for the Malady Mill” is both mewithoutYou’s first straight alt-rock song while betraying none of their identity or ingenuity. It transitions into the soft sad folk of East Enders Wives, before bursting into the philosophical revelry of "Cardiff Giant". And just like that, the album opens with four entirely distinct songs that hardly share anything but a vague gender tag but almost perfectly flow into one another.
What is most noteworthy about the album though is it’s latter half. "Fox’s Dream of a Log Flume" is still likely the best post-hardcore song the band has ever done, a perfect marriage of the band’s punk instincts and the melodic underpinnings they have recently perfected. It’s followed by "Nine Stories", which is something entirely new, melding the ambitious folk of “Beetle at the Coconut Estate” with a more mature and darker alt-rock feel, the song comes to life with an inevitable chord change before horns announce its climax. "Fiji Mermaid" is "Cardiff Giant" from the first half of the album mastered, combining that songs revelry and Aaron’s dynamism to create something both affecting and yet boldly cheerful. It’s the perfect bridge between Nine Stories and its mirror song “Bear’s Vision of St. Agnes”, which is almost a doppelganger of the former, reflecting its ambitious and dark art-rock aesthetic, its structure and even its horns and combining them with a more somber – but still celebratory – version of "Fiji Mermaid’s" refrain. It’s not just a culmination of what’s come before; it’s the end result, the album coming full circle on to itself. Which of course, makes the last song “All Circles” an utterly flawless conclusion, an exercise in simplicity and mastery that brings the album to an energetic jubilant end.
If one could take five songs to represent the entire sound of mewithoutYou throughout their career, one could not do any better than just playing the back-end of this album, which contains both the angst of their earlier records, the philosophical pinings of "Brother, Sister", the upbeat cheerfulness of “It’s All Crazy” and the darker maturity mewithoutYou finds in the latter stage of their career.
It’s almost remarkable just how much this album invites you to hum along to it considering what’s being presented here. As said before, nothing is clear here, and I have no plans to try and decipher the story of this album to you in any detail, but there are moments here that stand out.
I mainly drift to the two centerpiece songs on this album to determine when exactly Aaron’s resolute faith begins to fissure. "Nine Stories" is a story already told often in mewithoutYou’s discography, the Walrus, I’d argue a clear stand-in for Aaron, yearning for the release of himself from the world into the greater providence of God. But for the first time there’s a devils advocate, the owl, who revels in the material world . The song ends in a warning, the raising of a possibility, a doubt. “If there pleasure’s of your heaven ever end/ (Jacob’s) ladder just as soon descends.” It isn’t presented as a temptation. It’s presented as a truth.
And then there’s "Bear’s Vision of St. Agnes". Both near the end of a long journey, the Bear sacrifices himself by throwing himself off a cliff so that the exhausted Fox may consume his remains and reach Yellowstone, their promised land. It’s a climatic ending Aaron borrows from past fables. But the Bear’s idealistic rationalization, that himself and the fox would now be as one, is presented mournfully, even skeptically. Most devastatingly, there are clues scattered throughout "Fox’s Dream of the Log Flume" that the Fox, upon the Bear’s sacrifice, rushes to his own death as a result.
These are not the clear or easy resolutions found within Weiss’s parables from before. All of Aaron’s enlightened characters meet grisly ends. Take note of the wise elephant, which has a whole song about him being hanged. The only character to be envious of is the Tiger, who stays in his plastic crumbling cage within the train long after the other animals have left to find larger truths, painting himself as happy in captivity. What does the album itself draw by all these different tales? That no matter what journey one takes, one will end where they started – both a piece of wisdom and also almost an auditory shrug.
What is to be parsed from all of this - I’ve never been entirely sure, but it’s an important album among mewithoutYou’s discography representing both the full maturity of their sound and the crumbling of Aaron’s simple faith which will result in both a result more definable but even more complex in "Pale Horses". Aaron will again write entirely about himself in "Pale Horses", but "Ten Stories", another album full of dissociated tales – or at least tales that attempt the feat of disassociation and fail – is Aaron coming back to earth and returning to his own self-doubt. “Our aimless arrow words don’t mean a thing/ so by now I think it’s pretty obvious there’s no God/ there’s definitely a God!” Aaron startlingly interjects in "Nine Stories". Aaron is done knowing spiritual truths. But above of all "Ten Stories" shows a band who has fully mastered its craft. However odd the celebration of this album is, it's truly worth celebrating with for that.
