Review Summary: Late, by myself, in the boat of myself, no light and no land anywhere, cloudcover thick. I try to stay just above the surface, yet I’m already under and living within the ocean.
“From what the rest of us could tell
Dad tried his best but finally fell
Apart at just my age.”
-Existential Dread, Six Hours’ Time
At a certain point, right around “It’s All Crazy” every album mewithoutYou wrote just started to seem like a final album. Both records could have easily served as philosophical endcaps, both made it difficult to determine how much farther mewithoutYou could stretch their music, and how far Aaron Weiss, in turn, stretch his philosophy. Ten Stories was as far as the band could extend, it seemed. The band had successfully combined the styles of "Brother, Sister" and “It’s All Crazy” into a complete musical statement and Weiss could no longer stay close to the philosophy he held so dear in those records. If great art is succinct and knows when it is over, mewithoutYou should have been coming to a graceful end. It seems clear, from the opening song "Pale Horse", Aaron thought this too. “I thought I’d left this all behind” Aaron states, describing his words as “sideshow words” as if they were a burden to the music itself. It almost brings images of a championship boxer, dragged out of retirement, no longer the athlete or person he was, entering into a furious fray.
And sure enough, "Pale Horses" is where the levees break.
"Pale Horses" almost serves as a rebirth for the band, but a rebirth that fails to give them any kind of fresh start. It’s been nearly nine years since Aaron has written anything much personal about himself. In 2006 he saw himself in the now seemingly innocent images of nature and now in 2015, what replaces these images is the destruction of it. Aaron is now obessed with nuclear war and famine, marketing displays, Islamic terrorism. Pale Horses has become practically infamous among the mewithoutYou fanbase for its verbose and convoluted nature. In sections, without an encyclopedic recollection of culture and scripture, the album veers close to nonsense. Watermelon Ascot alone refers to soap brand, prohibition advocates, the rock band REM, an LA Times Editorial from 1996, the obscure poet Tagore, several anomalies within the English language, and recites a hymn from 1887. Aaron Weiss, the esteemed story teller of Indie Rock, has gone mad.
And it certainly makes sense, momentous shifts have occurred in Aaron Weiss’s life since even "Ten Stories", countless others in the years since 2006, when he last truly let his listener inside himself. "Pale Horses" is most defined by the death of Aaron’s father, Elliot, five years before its release. Elliot is a figure revered and feared in Aaron Weiss’s world, being both the man that formed the building blocks of Aaron’s nature and philosophy and also as a feared foreshadowing of the mental turmoil Aaron fears he too will share. It’s more than interesting that the only place this massive figure in Aaron’s life has been mentioned before was in Brother, Sister where he was portrayed as ranting against the government in a rocking chair, and now, sure enough, here’s Aaron, doing the musical equivilant about a fast-approaching apocalypse.
But there’s also a death in part to his spiritual self and a forsaking of his pursuit of an otherwodly self. "D-Minor" paints in vivid detail when Aaron first has sex, after marriage, after falling in love entirely unintentionally, leaving his celibate lifestyle behind. It’s an act that’s seen almost in dismay, one of him turning his back on God and falling into something wordly and temporal. As the song reaches a climax and Aaron chants “This is not the first time God has died,” it’s a melding of both the spiritual betrayal of himself – the losing of his past identity – and the death of his father. The two inexplicably connected.
Perhaps "Pale Horses" greatest strength is its emotional relevancy and intimacy. The specific meanings may be obfuscated but Aaron is still the storyteller he was, imparting an inescapable feeling of despair, dread and the sensitive heart it weighs on within his listener. Images and feelings protrude more clearly out of this record than within any of the band’s other albums. "Dorothy", a stunning and bitter intermission details the aftermath of Aaron’s father in a dream, ending in the Arabic reciting of “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me” until the recitation just becomes the repeating of his fathers name. One does not need to know these details to understand the song, the bare and minimalistic guitar tells it all.
The confusing and clashing nature of Aaron's lyrics make the listener feel the same uncertainty and loss of place as Aaron does, and it's as important device within in the album as anything else, but as the album progresses the meanings get clearer, while losing none of their complexity. "Magic Lantern Days", a perfection of the folk sound found within "It’s All Crazy" and "Ten Stories", almost serves as a perverse sequal of A Stick, A Carrot and String, where a reactor core becomes the manger and a nucleur bomb the savior. The song ends, nihilistically, with Aaron searching for where “the infant redeemer is laid” suggesting of the baby Jesus’s death as the nuclear bomb comes into fruition.
"Birgnam Wood" returns to the simpler imagery of times past, but with far more urgency, where Aaron takes the place of Issac and God/Elliot the place of Abraham sacrificing his sons, as Aaron pleads with him to spare him from the future of mental breakdowns he fears waits him, in a heavy and emotionally dense exercise of melody and intensity.
It all builds to "Rainbow Signs", one that transitions from the apprehensive and insecure soungs of Aaron’s wedding day to a foreboding calm before the storm, to the heavy riffage of the dropping of the H-Bomb, ending with a secret undescribed moment between Aaron and his Father where the two become one, Aaron accepting his personal apocalypse and whatever is to come. The obscurity of Aaron’s lyrics largely gone, Rainbow Signs tells the story of the whole album masterfully, entirely concentrates the terror of an apocalype within two minutes of music and ends with a moment soft, intimate and precious. It’s unquestionably the band's most accomplished song to date.
The most essential element of this record though is not the unsteady and fearful confessions of Aaron, but the band itself, which brings the destruction and dread within Aaron’s faults and creates a sound and atmosphere that makes those feelings universal. The band has returned to a darker shade of its sound in "Brother, Sister", with the added maturity and complexity they developed in the years that came after. It could perhaps be seen as the band repeating a comfortable sound for the first time, but there is also no more appropriate place the band could occupy for such a personal endeavor. "Pale Horses" literally sounds like a soundtrack for the end of the world. It’s fitting, too, that the band’s most potent musical performance to date is the most bare since "Catch us for the Foxes", horns, strings, accordians, entirely missing for the first time in 11 years. The most inspired choice by the band was the controversial decision to bring on Will Yip, who makes the further bold decision to give the record the barren, stark and seemingly lo-fi atmosphere it has, the shine that has accompanied mewithoutYou’s music since 2006 now entirely scrubbed out, making the record fully immersive.
Admittedly "Pale Horses" is where mewithoutYou became a band entirely relevant to myself. It’s perhaps mewithoutYou becoming post-modern, finally giving into the weight of life and the insanity of the present. It was the first to truly reflect the feelings left in the wake of my own loss of faith and my own mental collapses. No other record seemed to better reflect what it was like to watch the rise of Donald Trump on my television screen, or the loss of confidence and identity that goes along with losing the first job that made you give a ***, or the loss of loved ones and the depthless hole that takes their place. In the end, all apocalypses, no matter how chaotic or indecipherable, large or small, are personal. Out of any piece of art ever created, "Pale Horses" best recognizes this in my eyes.
Maybe incredibly, Pale Horses would not be the conclusion of the band, as would have once again seemed fitting. Aaron Weiss will write his sideshow words at least one more time. But the newly released [Untitled] is neither a moving on from this or even an evolution, but rather an expansion of the themes and conflicts found within this record. The group that crafted "Brother, Sister" has ended. "Pale Horses" is now the record that defines mewithoutYou.
