mewithoutYou - [untitled] e.p. & [Untitled] LP (2018) Album • Page 131

Rowan5215 · Oct 7, 2018

ALL JOKING ASIDE

Lucas27 · Oct 7, 2018

Rowan5215 said:

ALL JOKING ASIDE

Chills just reading this.

Your Milkshake · Oct 7, 2018

teebs41 said:

You didn’t ask me but I’ll just keep adding thoughts

The album covers and the way the ball explodes on the lp.. it’s really cool, I feel like the lp actually has those explosive moments, these tiny balls of energy that just explode and sound incredible.

A great example of this is the end of tortoises and the end of new wine, new skins. Not to mention 9:27, head for hydra, and Wendy and Betsy that feel explosive all the way through

To me, it looks like the LP’s artworks center chaos is being thrown from slits on the borders at all cardinal directions, like from other dimensions, instead of exploding out.

Rowan5215 · Oct 7, 2018

Yeah so weirdly enough I think Ten Stories is still the album I love above all their others. I couldn't even tell you why

Rowan5215 · Oct 7, 2018

Like the song to song flow, the general beauty and easiness of the melodies, probably my all round favourite Weiss lyrics are all on there but none of those are quite the reason

cj · Oct 7, 2018

Rowan5215 said:

ALL JOKING ASIDE

FOUR FINGERS WIDE

Serenity Now · Oct 7, 2018

You know an album is good when you have it playing in the house and can't bring yourself to leave that area because you don't want to miss a song

cj · Oct 7, 2018

if you fail first, some warm, bright day
i'll unperform on your unmarked grave

one of my fav parts of the record.

Dog with a Blog · Oct 7, 2018

Cameron said:

This record is a perfect progression of their last two albums. No song shows that more than [dormouse sighs]. What a tune.

Agreed. I’ve raved about this song a lot but I was just listening I was like, “damn, I can’t believe mwY made this song.” Like, it makes perfect sense, but I would have never expected it

Serenity Now · Oct 7, 2018

bedwettingcosmo said:

if you fail first, some warm, bright day
i'll unperform on your unmarked grave

one of my fav parts of the record.

Agree. Been trying to interpret the term "unperform." In one sense, I suppose it could mean "die' or "pass on," but in the context of the song, I think it could also mean putting down the facade and stop managing the narrative. ie., being real.

cj · Oct 7, 2018

Michael Row the Boat Ashore - Wikipedia

Kevin360 · Oct 7, 2018

This album hits me in the honey nut feelios.

Also, I miss @RyanRyan.

cj · Oct 7, 2018

i literally can't put it down

primavera · Oct 7, 2018

this might be their best?! how lol

Kevin360 · Oct 7, 2018

It’s their best. And I can’t even comprehend how.

It’s insane. It is an absolutely insane notion. Andolutky.

That was supposed to say “absolutely” again, but I’m leaving it.

Chris Reynolds · Oct 7, 2018

Guys....they're gonna make MORE music over the rest of their lives. Like, holy shit.

scottlechowicz · Oct 7, 2018

I quite like this.

Dog with a Blog · Oct 7, 2018

Chris Reynolds said:

Guys....they're gonna make MORE music over the rest of their lives. Like, holy shit.

I always feel like every album is their last haha

Chris Reynolds · Oct 7, 2018

Dog with a Blog said:

I always feel like every album is their last haha

Worst case scenario and you're right.... that means we get some Geology albums, some Aaron solo albums, and Mike and Ricky form a band that kicks ass for the next decade plus

awakeohsleeper · Oct 8, 2018

Chris Reynolds said:

Worst case scenario and you're right.... that means we get some Geology albums, some Aaron solo albums, and Mike and Ricky form a band that kicks ass for the next decade plus

I honestly can't see Aaron ever doing a solo album.

Tim · Oct 8, 2018

I haven't decided how I feel about this album yet other than it's really good. The past albums this reminds me the most of are Ten Stories & A->B, more so than it does Pale Horses. I both don't connect with it emotionally, and emotionally connect with it a lot, in a weird kinda way. Yeah. I dunno.

Regardless, it's good.

Micah511 · Oct 8, 2018

Does anyone look at Genius for lyrics? There already seems to be some good annotations for this album. mewithoutYou - [Untitled] Lyrics and Tracklist | Genius

awakeohsleeper · Oct 8, 2018

Tim said:

I haven't decided how I feel about this album yet other than it's really good. The past albums this reminds me the most of are Ten Stories & A->B, more so than it does Pale Horses. I both don't connect with it emotionally, and emotionally connect with it a lot, in a weird kinda way. Yeah. I dunno.

Regardless, it's good.

Thanks for the post. I actually really agree. It's hard to put your finger on but I can particularly resonate with the "I both don't connect with it emotionally, and emotionally connect with it a lot" sentiment. Brilliant album.

Micah511 said:

Does anyone look at Genius for lyrics? There already seems to be some good annotations for this album. mewithoutYou - [Untitled] Lyrics and Tracklist | Genius

I tend to avoid Genius for mewithoutYou lyrics as people tend to take a very basic and isolated interpretative stance. It's easy to jump to a conclusion with one line that is so far from what the intended meaning was. Also, Aaron has said that there are usually two or three themes grouped together (at least for the last two, maybe three albums) and I find on Genius people try and make every line fit in with one theme.

I prefer to wait for David Daughtery (ohdoubters) and his interpretations. He teamed up with another person this time around. Have you read his PDF for [untitled] ep? You can here.

Long read, but I like how he opened up the annotations for the EP and it explains my feelings about Genius a bit more:

Any fan of mewithoutYou knows that discerning the meaning of Aaron Weiss’ lyrics can be simultaneously rewarding and infuriating in equal measure. The challenges are innumerable for the interpreter, and they completely change with each album. Take, for instance, Ten Stories. On the face of it, this is something akin to Weiss’ take on Kipling’s Just So Stories, with a fairly straightforward narrative of anthropomorphized circus animals escaping into the wider world. Yet, that is probably one of the more philosophically dense and inscrutable of his lyrical oeuvre. One can easily make the mistake of granting the character of Mother Elephant the distinction of a Christological allegory, especially when one song seems to take its title from a C.S. Lewis essay called God in the Dock. However interviews and subsequent listens convincingly show that the “Christ-like” character of Mother Elephant is just another element of Aaron’s psyche (as are all of the animals, probably), and a lens through which to view Hegelian philosophical concepts and Saussure-ian semiotics (yeah, I don’t get it either, I’m punching above my weight class here). The title was merely a coincidence and came primarily from a Morrisey lyric, of all places. As usual with Aaron Weiss, nothing is as it seems at first glance, and perhaps more importantly, nothing is necessarily as deep as one might be inclined to think. Take another example from Ten Stories with the inclusion of real life historical figure turned mythological American folk hero Casey Jones. I spent a great deal of time working out what his inclusion could mean for the grander concepts of faith and philosophy and folklore being explored on the album, only to later find out anecdotally that Weiss was completely unaware that Casey Jones was more than the titular character from the Grateful Dead song.

Other albums offer different challenges. [a-b] Life has less in terms of literature and philosophical or religious reference but is rife with personally relevant lyrics that don’t necessarily lend themselves to an interpretation that does not involve wild speculation as to the life of the singer. This is one of the reasons that I’ve altered my approach to interpreting the lyrics over the years toward considering Aaron Weiss as more of a character within this lyrical world than as a person writing the lyrics. On the surface, this may not make much sense. Obviously, any amount of lyrical interpretation will involve some amount of speculation as to the mindset of the writer. However, it’s become increasingly clear over the years that Aaron Weiss has crafted a lyrical persona that is in a sense heightened. This is most apparent on Pale Horses. While that album contains some of the most achingly personal lyrics of any of the albums, especially regarding the passing of his father, the imagery employed became ever more illusory and less applicable in a 1:1 ratio scenario. For instance, it’s so very tempting, given Weiss’ predilections and the band’s past as a staple in the so-called “Christian Rock” scene, to interpret every instance in which there is a reference to some under-represented secondary “character” in the lyrics called “you” allegorically in reference to God or Christ or even Allah. My experience with taking very deep dives into the past two albums have convinced me with increasing ferocity that this is almost always the wrong starting point. Many times, I was sure that God was being referenced only to later be proven by some interview or through some discovery of a source for a particular line that I was dead wrong. Usually because I had been working under the assumption that a song was written about or even “to” God, this often caused me to entirely rethink my method and I often ended up bringing about a clearer picture as to the song’s meaning. The lesson here being that it’s almost never what you first assume it might be with Aaron Weiss, and he’s a far more complex lyricist than to always write merely about a struggle with the concept of God, though that is still probably the largest overarching theme in all of his lyrics.

So, with that said, I offer my own pet methodology for what constitutes a good and well-balanced annotation for any mewithoutYou song. Granted this method I employ can come up with wildly divergent conclusions based on the person utilizing it, which is one of the secret joys of this very niche hobby. This is one of the primary reasons I’ve tapped my friend and fellow probably-too-much-of-a-superfan Cliff Martin to offer his own unique take as a lyricist himself to my sometimes admittedly one-track mind. In any case, I begin by looking at “primary sources”, that is, interviews with the band or press releases in which themes or inspirations, or the source material for lyrics are explicitly stated. I then move on to considering what I call the “mewithoutYou Library”, which are either books I know Aaron Weiss has read, books and articles about subjects that have cropped up on prior albums, or books that seem likely to have been read by him due to their subject matter. It’s exciting to go from there to sniffing out unique tidbits like a big fat hog after truffles. Sometimes I stumble across something that seems very intriguing, but just doesn’t quite fit, but then again there’s some additional snippet of information that makes me just have to include it if only to show how very coincidentally interesting it is. One of my favorite examples of this came about very recently during a preliminary skim of the [untitled] EP, when I stumbled across an article about a college professor who offered a class called “Existential Despair” that ran up to seven hours at a time. This is intriguingly close to “Existential Dread, Six Hours’ Time”, but it couldn’t be, right? It’s too out of left field! Too weird! I thought to myself, “I can only include this odd sidetrack thought in the annotation as a possibility if there is one more thing connecting it to mewithoutYou or Aaron Weiss.” Low and behold, the professor hailed from their homestate of Pennsylvania. Convincing? Slightly. Possible? Possibly! Interesting? Definitely. And so, it goes, hour after hour of chasing little turns of phrase and idioms and the ever present puns down rabbit trails on Google until I have a collection of disparate thoughts and images on a song that I can use to attempt a coherent interpretation thereof. That is how I roll. All that is to say that the worst way to go about this is to Google something and take the first result as gospel truth as to your interpretive lens. You end up with Genius.com note-makers convinced that Pale Horses contains songs about metalcore band As I Lay Dying, which is just… no…

Lastly, I’m probably wrong. Like, a lot of the time. I probably agree with maybe 75% of my Pale Horses Annotations at best, and far less with my Ten Stories Annotations given the years I’ve spent reading and learning about mewithoutYou since. So, take everything I say with a grain of salt. I’d like to say I do this for the fans and for the extreme niche of a niche of a niche of very minor internet notoriety it provides me, but really this is all selfishly for enhancing my own enjoyment of my favorite band’s music. It is only as a fortuitous whim that it ended up being put together in a form that was structured enough to be worth sharing with the mewithoutYou community writ large. Don’t take my interpretations as the end of the road where the meaning of a lyric is concerned. Disagree if it’s called for and call me on the mat about it. Likely, I’ll internalize the argument and something new and far more interesting will come of it. I feel no real loyalty to my own interpretive bias. Even Aaron Weiss himself has said he has no feeling of ownership for his own lyrics, and often prefers to supplant whatever his original intent with a lyric was with some fan’s interpretation that he deems more interesting (another frustration for those of us who just want to know what he meant, damn it!)

As always, when it comes to doing what I do here: The truth belongs to Aaron Weiss; the mistakes were mine.

Any other band Genius is pretty useful though, haha!

Micah511 · Oct 8, 2018

Wendy and Betsy sandwiched between 2,459 Miles and New Wine, New Skins is masterful sequencing. This whole album is paced very well. NW,NS is becoming my favorite, I think.

cj · Oct 8, 2018

never considered loving a mwY album more than brother sister but here we are

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