2. mewithoutYou -
Ten Stories. Anyone that's a fan knows the story: mewithoutYou began as a post-hardcore band with spoken- and shouted-vocals and heavy instrumentals but gradually became less heavy and more experimental with each album. The band's last record,
It's All Crazy! It's All False! It's All a Dream! It's All Right, completely deviated from the group's hardcore foundations for a more melodic, singalong aesthetic. Moreover, whereas earlier albums focused on Weiss' personal struggles,
Crazy! centers around fables concerning anthropromorphic animals and vegetables. So when mewithoutYou announced that their fifth album would be released in 2012, it was anyone's guess where the guys would take their sound.
I don't know anything about truth, but I know falsehood when I see it, and it looks like this whole world you've made.
To my relief, the first song I heard was the thunderous "Fox's Dream of the Log Flume," which features one of Weiss's strongest deliveries ever, as he shouts his last-gasp vocals for two and a half minutes. Weiss also leads the equally relentless instrumentals, as the rattling guitars, thumping drums, and grooving bass follow his volatile vocals up and down the windy track. The song is a part of a larger narrative about a circus train's crash in 19th century Montana, and here we listen to the conversation between the escaped Fox and Bear. But this is not a simple allegory; it's a densely-packed discussion of truth, existence, God, love, and death. We have brilliant one-liners like, "some with certainty insist 'no certainty exists,'" and there's even some comedy, as the bear recollects: "I asked her, 'do you ever have that recurring fantasy / where you push little kids from the tops of the rides?' She shook her head no and I said 'Oh, neither do I.'" But while culling Weiss's lyrics is often inspiring, it's not always illuminating to the song's grander message: the Fox had once "mistook signs for signified" (or mistook words for something real or concrete) and thereafter tried to find Truth separate from language ("tied my word-ropes in anchor bends"). But the Bear questions whether the Fox can certainly deny all certainty in language and directs some blame at the Fox for their aimless travels: as the Fox withdraws from the world's illusions of truth ("all the bearing points we thought we knew") they move "waywardly on . . . it's still dark on the deck of our boats / haphazardly blown, broken bows." Between language and silence, certainty and doubt, the Bear announces: "I think it's pretty obvious that there's no God / and there's definitely a God." Then, during the song's climax, the fox imagines their death in the album's boardwalk/carnival-themed imagery: " I charged at the waves with a glass in my hand / and was tossed like a ball at the bottle stand / and landed beside your remains on the stones / where your cold fingers wrapped round my ankle bone / while maybe ten feet away was a star / thousands of times the size of our sun / exploding like tiny balloons you'd throw darts at."
This mock trial can no more determine my lot than can driftwood determine the ocean's waves.
The song is a stunning commentary on religion and post-structuralism: if language creates illusions that block Truth, how do we seek and communicate Truth outside of language? The Fox claims certainty exists, but the Bear is skeptical, finding contradictions in seemingly oppositional binaries: certainty/uncertainty, existence/nonexistence, Truth/Falseness. The song invokes numerous questions: Why must animals discuss these very human issues? What does each animal represent? What does it mean to sing a song renouncing language? We never receive answers, though we do see the Bear and Fox again in the album's penultimate song, where the weary Bear envisions St. Agnes and jumps off a cliff: "We'll fly in straight lines as from carronades / we'll crash like tidal waves, decimate the islands / as our hollowed lumber falls like water, ends where I start."
Did you come knocking on my door? Or did I come to yours? Whose ship came washed up on whose shore?
As if the lyrics were not rich enough, the box set I purchased comes with a twelve-inch lyric booklet with interpretive drawings of each song, providing an interactive and extremely rewarding aesthetic experience to accompany the music. The album is a gift that keeps giving: Weiss's lyrics are difficult but certainly not impenetrable; it simply takes time and experience to unlock his messages. But it's not just the lyrics that are profound; the music on Ten Stories is wonderfully varied, from the big electric guitars, heavy bass, and wild drums on opener "February, 1878" to the deceptively heavy melodies of "Grist for the Malady Mill." mewithoutYou also find new ground on songs like "Cardiff Giant," which contrasts bright, jangly guitars with Weiss's heavy screams, and "Fiji Memory," which features wailing guitars over acoustic strums.
I saw how far I've traveled down the solipsistic road. I climbed out to ask for directions. . . . [They] asked about the passage from the Bible on my wrists, but I couldn't catch my breath enough to answer.
I know I sound like a fanboy when I describe this album, but Ten Stories is the most engrossing record I've heard all year; each song has layers of meaning that need unpacking to adequately convey its brilliance, and frankly I'm still digging into many of them. Like mwY's other albums, I imagine I will be listening to Ten Stories for a long time, and it will grow with me over the years. Overall, Ten Stories represents the intersection of the band's heavier roots with its more experimental, melodic ambitions -- a kind of Hegelian synthesis, which is fitting, since the album ends by quoting Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit:
all circles presuppose they'll end where they begin, but only in their leaving can they come back round.
1. JAPANDROIDS - Celebration Rock. I had a hard time deciding between mewithoutYou's sacred "stories" and Japandroids's secular "celebrations," but the reason I ultimately gave Celebration Rock the nod is a simple one: it's the record that made me happiest this year. Celebration Rock is a fantastic album, an enormous leap forward from the occasionally amazing but mostly uneven Post-Nothing. I blasted this album in my car all summer, screaming along with Brian King as he shouts, "OH YEAH! ALL RIGHT! Hearts from hell collide on fire's highway tonight." The duo said that they anticipated their fans' live reactions to their new songs while recording their fittingly-titled album, and they shouted and screamed to their songs as if they were their own fans. It's a pretty cool recording philosophy, and it shows. Plus, it worked.
