There appears to be an unspoken tradition when reviewing albums by mewithoutYou whereby at least fifty percent of the wordcount is handed over, keenly and without protest, to discussing the band’s religious beliefs. Paragraph after paragraph on lyricist Aaron Weiss’ faith, its interaction with branches of other faiths and their perceived occurrence within and impact on the words worming their way out of his brain. It’s understandable, as both the band’s prior association with the explicitly Christian label Tooth & Nail and Weiss’ famously sesquipedalian lyrics can lend themselves to over-analysis before the drums have even come in.
But there’s more to this than rock fans finding themselves faced with a wall of dense lyrical imagery produced by a band whose beliefs form a strong part of their identity. Put simply, early mewithoutYou albums were pretty bloody difficult to write about; to this end, sixth album ‘Pale Horses’ – their first for nominally ‘punk’ label Run For Cover – harks back to the band’s first albums in a delightfully difficult way.
Part of the challenge is that, much as with 2004 masterpiece ‘Catch For Us The Foxes’, mewithoutYou don’t so much write songs as they do construct sonic waves on which Weiss’ scholarly poetry sails, his relentless stream of rhetoric as much part of the instrumentation as it is the focus. And what instrumentation.
Though the album’s likely to be cited as a ‘return to x’, where ‘x’ is ‘form’, or ‘their early sound’ or ‘when they were good’, there’s a measured quality to mewithoutYou in 2015 that sees some of the rage of the early 00s tempered by a greater focus on groove and melody. The album’s seamless flow ensures it’s one to be listened to in its entirety, all notions of ‘highlights’ or ‘best tracks’ rendered redundant.
That may sound like a cop-out, but ‘Pale Horses’ isn’t a collection of songs. It’s an album in the classic sense – a voyage on the aforementioned waves, the destination is irrelevant. And when you do arrive, you’ll find yourself pushing away from the shore, immediately pressing ‘repeat’ and setting sail again.
ROB BARBOUR