Review Summary: In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art.
I like to believe there must be a small but fervent subgroup within mewithoutYou's fanbase that consists of pastor's children turned agnostic/atheist. I first discovered mewithoutYou 11 years ago, at the age of 15. A devoted Christian at the time emphatic about following in my father's footsteps, Aaron Weiss was the first to begin to sway me in a different direction. mewithoutYou were active participants in an Illinois-based Christian festival called Cornerstone from, if Youtube is any indication, 2003 to 2008. There are many remarkable performances one can find of the band playing at the event, but the greatest treasure is footage of Aaron Weiss giving sermons at the festival , if one can even call them that. The first one I saw was given in 2007, when Aaron got up in front of a crowd of christian hipsters and meekly told them -
"A friend of mine - of the festival - called me and asked me if I wanted to give a seminar. I said 'I'm a fool, I don't know anything. But if we can organize a dinner and eat together, that might be nice."'
At the time, I was used to dusty catholic homilies and fell asleep to the audio of sermons from southern baptist preachers, both of which depicted themselves as ordained truth-tellers of divine inspiration. But Weiss who went ahead, gathered everyone in a circle, and had the entire crowd - those willing - share their opinions on the intersection of Christ-inspired pacifism and war while munching on food together, never once presenting anything he said as guaranteed truth. He suddenly struck me as far more representative of everything I found in the New Testament and everything I wanted to be as a christian myself than what I knew of christianity before. From that point on, I grew with Aaron, in a way, from someone who wrestled with faith and doubt in a strict religious framework, to someone whose beliefs, and doubts, widened past any specific or organized religious system today. Certainly, ever since the age of 15, Aaron has been something of a spiritual inspiration to me, more profound and representative than almost any other , although I'm sure, if I ever met him, he'd repeat the same line. "I'm a fool." Which is fine. I'm a fool as well.
It's always been a difficult assertion to proclaim mewithoutYou a christian band, but in 2004, Weiss was certainly a christian. Catch Us For The Foxes, which widened Aaron's focus from a cramped metaphor of a estranged relationship to a focus much more universal, is the first to depict that faith in a truly recognizable and relatable way. In it Weiss is at his most raw, struggling to reconcile his depression and suicidal ideation to the christian/spiritual ideal of selflessness, sacrifice, and the surrendering of ego, grappling with how the two facets of himself differ and how they intertwine. Here, Aaron Weiss lays his spiritual ideals bare for the first time. In January 1979, a song lamenting his birth - "If I can be the servant of all/ (no lower place to fall), in Leaf, a song rejecting the comforts of life "Oh to want one thing!/ (The purity of heart)." - and they clash directly with his most destructive desires - In Carousels "And counting the plates of cars from out-of-state/ How I could jump in their path as they hurry along!" At the end, during the stunning Son of a Widow, when Aaron asks his listeners "Why not be crushed to make wine?" It's almost impossible to tell which of the two urges is really being fulfilled.
It's a devastatingly honest and complicated way to share his faith, and unlike bands of a similar elk, it isn't done so much to glorify God, or profess his faith, or try to convert lost souls. Aaron has always been too humble for any of that. It's purely confessional, an invitation into his psyche, of what little significance it is. An invitation to eat a meal with him, if you will, and share your own struggles and your own feelings with him. It's the defining difference that has always separated mewithoutYou from other Christian bands, and it was first realized here.
But that was far from the only thing to evolve between the band's debut album and Catch us for the Foxes, a breakthrough record that first put mewithoutYou on the map. Weiss has stated that he moved from being a drummer to being a vocalist simply so he can dance. The vocals, were, at first, rather secondary. Catch us for the Foxes was the first time the band really gave him something to dance to. It's striking just how much more space there is in this album, with the band no longer feeling the urge to bury everything with distortion and push it along at a breakneck. Rather they do something uncharacteristic and peculiar for a young band in the hardcore scene - they slow down and they quiet down. A remarkable interplay between the different members of the band emerges, with guitar chords and drum beats, and base lines endlessly looping around each other. No member, except for maybe drummer Rickie Mazzotta, is flashy or virtuosic. Rather, the band is utilitarian, each member playing their own modest parts to attain a compositional whole. Catch us for the Foxes is really where mewithoutYou's music starts to find a flow and a true rhythm. At first it can all almost form into some hazy backdrop. But that's perfectly alright, anything more grandiose would detract from the band's new found weapon.
That is, of course, Aaron Weiss. The downshift in mewithoutYou's music allows Aaron to quit the hardcore schtick and develop a style entirely unique. Here he's less screamer and without abandon more of a beat poet prone to losing his cool. The change allows Aaron to be more rhythm based in his flow and enunciation, but oft-kilter enough to never be truly predictable. His voice shifts in every song to fit every sonic nook and cranny, moving from speaking at room-level, to barely even a whisper, to sudden screaming in the space of single minutes. It creates a dynamism that makes Aaron as special as a vocalist that he is now. After attempting to create heavy moment after heavy moment in A to B: Life, none even compare to Seven Sisters where midway through the song, meditating on the foolishness of pursuing worldly pleasures instead of spiritual nourishment, Aaron launches into a vitriolic scream: "Oh my God, I want to shoot myself just thinking about it. You think I don't mean what I say? I mean every word I say!" It's utterly devastating and invigorating, and the entire time, the band is barely even pushing a mid-paced tempo. There's not many hooks at all found within the record - they aren't needed. The band's newfound confidence, following Aaron's confessional ramblings wherever they lead them, is more than enough, and even fourteen years later, Aaron's ability to unchain himself from standard vocal conventions is the band's most potent tool.
The most successful moments here, as mewithoutYou would come themselves to notice, are where Aaron's newfound style and melody are combined. Disaster Tourism is a centerpiece of the album, switching from sung verses to Aaron's spoken style, the song picking up ample momentum from the pure contrast. It's perhaps achieved most successfully in Paper Hanger, where softly spoken verses and a melodic refrain are paired together, only to be jolted by a full-throated scream by Aaron to end the song. But other songs show the band's newfound mastery in a way more pure to where the band finds themselves at. January 1979 is a tour-de-force, thriving off of a driving baseline and a passionate performance from Weiss, but the record's best moment is Four Word Letter Pt. 2., which culminates in a chant that harkens back to Aaron's father's arabic roots. It's a stunning climax to the record.
Aaron will still grow stronger in his craft by leaps and bounds, growing more adept in his lyricism, world-building and songcraft, but it's hard to understate how monumental of an album Catch us for the Foxes is. In it, Weiss finds his spiritual identity and his identity as a performer, and the band as a whole responds to it beautifully. There will come to be many bands directly influenced by what is created here - the beginnings of a post-post-hardcore genre - they will come to include La Dispute, Listener, and in more indirect ways, Piano Becomes Teeth and Touche' Amore among many others. And for the band itself, the building blocks established here will come to make mewithoutYou giants of their genre.
But the thing is, when it comes to the identity they will establish and accomplish, they're not even halfway there. They'll reach their destination in their next record - the already oft-mentioned Brother, Sister.
