mewithoutYou - Catch For Us the Foxes

Album Score: 8.0/10

In terms of where to start this blog, there really is so much to say that I don’t where to start.  So I will start with what I know; mewithoutYou is my favorite band that I have ever listened to.  Notice that I didn’t say best band….just favorite.  And of mwY’s albums, ‘Catch For Us the Foxes’ is my favorite full length studio album they have released.  Now you may be asking if it is my favorite album by my favorite band, why does it only get a 8 out of 10.  As expressed in my initial post for this blog, I want to avoid any kind of major personal bias that would would do anything to deter me from judging an album on anything other than the tracks on the album.  Music is not something that really lends itself to judgmental objectivity very well, but you’d be very hard pressed to explain how The Beatles White Album is not musically superior to ‘Oops! I did it again’ or how it’s not better than Ezra Pounder playing the basoon (inside joke…please ignore).  Judging your favorite album is hard to do, but if I have to start with something, I might as well start with this.  Let the review begin.

If this is your first experience with mewithoutYou, then you may face an initial wall to get over in the form of vocalist Aaron Weiss’s singing…yelling…speaking…uh, stylistic talking?.  Though in this album he will occasionally ‘sing’ something, to many people he will be said to be speaking and yelling the lyrics.  Having spent a great deal of time researching and reading interviews about this band, I feel that the main reason for this is when first starting mwY, Weiss was uncomfortable with his singing voice and was looking to have more of a screaming style to his vocals.  But Weiss’s lyrics are so poetic and beautiful that I’m sure he felt that they should not be hidden behind a veil of misunderstood mumblings and grunts.  Reading some of Weiss’s lyrics you might more like elegant poems than lyrics to a hard rock album.  But ultimately I feel that lyrics give the album so much depth because they seem to come from a place of honesty and personal experience.  If you are able to get around Weiss’s vocal stylings or at least ignore it for a while and enjoy the music behind him, soon you will not even notice it and hopefully hear how well it fits the music as if he creating a new style of musical vocals.

Outside of his voice, the rest of the band is often categorized as a post hardcore style (if you have no idea what post hardcore means, don’t worry, it’s not that important).  Michael Weiss (Aaron’s brother) plays lead guitar throughout the album much like Aaron sings, with kind of a free reign to seemingly improvise over the rhythm section.  In the second track, January 1979, this improv type guitar style becomes very apparent underneath the second verse.  Well, at least that’s where it become most apparent to me.  It brings a whole different dynamic to the album.  It is a beautiful contrast to Aaron’s vocal style.  Harsh and erratic yelling with beautiful, sonorous lead guitar underneath.  The band’s drummer, Rickie Mazzotta, lends to the improv style by being free to add his own stylistic furls and changes to the beat as he sees fit.  This is probably most apparent in Tie Me Up! Untie Me!, The Soviet, Paper Hanger.  While vocals, lead guitar, and drums are given a lot of room to roam, Bass and rhythm guitar are the more constrained to keep the song going onward.  But they too are occasionally given a moment to shine, however briefly.

Accessibility to a large audience will always be a problem with this album will always be an issue because of Weiss’s voice.  But listeners are rewarded with a large amount of very catchy choruses and riffs scattered throughout the album.  Ultimately, I think what gives the band the power to be so experimental and improvisational is the emotional leadership that Aaron gives to the band.  Despite every twist and turn of turn that you get, you will consistently come out at the end of a track with a feeling that you listened to a good, well-written song.  And though the subject of the lyrics and path the instruments take you different places for each song, you can’t help but have a hard time finding any distinct uniqueness to each and every song on the album.  The songs will occasionally run together   While this means that the album is able to hold a good emotional consistency, it becomes my main (and really only) complaint with the album.  But the fact that this still remains my favorite album will tell you how much I love it’s collective message/song.

A lot of other things I have to say about this album come from a more personal standpoint.  And though I am tempted to say ‘Screw it! This is my blog and I’ll do it the way I want’, I want to keep these posts shorter objective and about what the artist presents, not what it does to me personally.

Artist/Album Comparisons : 30% Colour Revolt, 15% Alt. Punk, 30% Art Rock, 15% Poetry, 10% Atmospheric Rock

Me musing on what music I should muse upon next.

Okay, so I realize that nothing I say is going to be revolutionary or maybe even not very inspirational, but I feel like there needs to be an outlet for me as I try and embark on this journey. I want to know everything about music. And I don’t mean that I want to like everything, I just want to know about it. Have you ever had a conversation with someone that totally shot down every band and album that you ever liked? Well I want to be that guy…but less douche baggy. It just seems that the dude seems to know where everything in the musical universe seems to belong. Even if there is an upcoming band in a genre that he doesn’t necessarily like, he still knows about them and can tell you about them. Unfortunately, one of the side effects of this is a sense of arrogance that what they like is the best. Though I do believe there is a lot of musical drub out there, I believe you can’t really bash someone for their musical taste (unless they really deserve it, in which case I say lay into them). I grew up in music, but I’ve had to learn everything backwards and therefore I find an inordinate amount of holes in areas that I feel like I should know.

I didn’t start off with a proper introduction into music. I kind of had to learn a descent amount of it on my own and with an occasional musical mentor here and there. The good thing about having a few different mentors is that I was able to get a very wide range of influences and therefore develop my musical tastes to a point where now I can find something I appreciate and like in almost in every single genre of music. But the more bands that I find, the more bands I have to discover that influenced them and repeat. I think I would love to be a writer for Rolling Stone or Pitchfork, but I question whether I have the writing chops to accurately discuss and assess bands and their music because I do not have the historical knowledge and musically critical ear to be as good as what you would read from professional music writers. But with all that said, I find that many professional writers let different mind frames and dispositions influence their reviews in a detrimental manor.

As previously stated, I don’t expect anything that I write on this blog to be great, but the only way you get better at something is through practice, right? So I hope that if you read my blog then maybe you find a new band that you like. Maybe you hear a different point of view on a genre/style of music and gain a new appreciation. Maybe I get bored of doing this in a couple weeks and never write anything on this blog again. But really my main goal of this blog is for personal reasons; I hope to reach some kind of musical knowledge ‘nirvana’. And as ridiculous as something like that sounds, it can make more sense than one would think. Music to me seems to be it’s own religion, a belief and study of a teaching or form that leads to a higher consciousness. Also most religions are ones that believe that you will never reach any sort of ‘perfection’ and that the main goal is to just keep striving for that kind of ‘perfection’ even though there is a knowledge that you will never reach it. Well, because musical knowledge is ever growing and is already so immensely large and dense, I never expect to know everything about every band in every genre. But I want to at least try….not matter how bad I fail, I want to try. And at the end of the journey (read: I die), I hope I’ve found a bunch of mind blowingly awesome bands that I wouldn’t have ordinarily found without that knowledge.

Jay M.