This year, Philadelphia's mewithoutYou celebrate their fifteenth anniversary as a band. This being an achievement in itself, even more notable when one considers that, with all the stylistic changes they have undergone, they've only lost three members. The driving force of the band is now, as it has ever been, frontman Aaron Weiss's poetic bent and fascinating, complex lyricism; but his focus and the band's sound have both developed naturally, often independent of each other.
The band have always sought to keep listeners guessing and make them think, bringing each phase of their career to its logical conclusion – the brash hardcore punk of '[A->B] Life' and 'Catch For Us the Foxes'; displaying folk-rock influences on 'Brother, Sister' before considerably softening their sound on 'It's All Crazy! It's All False! It's All A Dream! It's Alright', building an album around the exploration of existential meaning, spiritual reflection and religious parables – before throwing themselves into something new. They're an ambitious band, exploring heady concepts and setting them to music that doesn't feel as though it has to conform to a certain genre.
With 'Pale Horses', their sixth album (and, incredibly, the first to receive a formal UK release), the band expand upon the new elements they introduced to their sound with 2012's 'Ten Stories', but it frequently references their earlier, more aggressive work. Lead single 'Red Cow' is a nervous, agitated beast that lends itself quite easily to the record's apocalyptic artwork (a painting by long-time collaborator Vasily Kafanov) and title (the first of a great many references to the Horsemen of the Apocalypse), while Weiss has perfected the balance between his more melodic side and the shouted/screamed delivery he was initially known for.
He and his band have learned to deconstruct even the most familiar mewithoutYou tropes; in the past, they were "comforted by sequences of sounds [they] knew" (to quote the self-referential, quasi-title track 'Pale Horse'), but all across the record, they're breaking new ground. Typical verse-chorus structure is always something they've toyed with, but they have decided to do away with it almost entirely this time around, with songs often ending up in places completely different than those in which they began.
The unpredictable structures and unstoppable flow of the record mean that it'll be half over before you know it – barely a moment of respite is offered before the record's centrepiece 'Dorothy' presents itself six songs in – but there are enough musical and lyrical hooks to entice listeners back for repeated journeys into the world the album inhabits… and what a world. You could spend days unpacking the lyrics, researching references as varied as Dostoyevsky, Bukowski, Shakespeare's 'Macbeth', and T.S. Eliot; not to mention the litany of religious references that pepper the album.
mewithoutYou have never done things by halves, and this album is no exception, with Weiss struggling with faith, love, identity, mental well-being and so much more besides, before burying these things deep beneath other layers of meaning. Shying away from the conceptual nature of 'Ten Stories', it's as personal an album as he's ever written – more than just an amalgamation of the band's previous work, it is perhaps the purest distillation yet of everything that makes them who and what they are: rewarding, confusing, joyous, heartbreaking, immediate and profound, all in one.
8/10
Words: Gareth O'Malley
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