mewithoutYou zero in on precisely the experimentation and energy that’s drawn legions of fans to their side over the years with their 2018 LP [Untitled], out now via Run For Cover Records. The band’s presentation remains uniquely personal. There’s an invitingly rambling, stream of consciousness sense at times to the work, something that hardly any artist could pull off. Frontman Aaron Weiss takes the listener down what feels like the winding road of his mind, singing in his familiar, spoken word approaching style about personal ambitions for self-actualization as easily as he shares metaphor that’s, well, much more lofty.
Throughout his work, he retains a striking sense of control that helps hold his band’s presentation together. He’s not simply veering this way and that with his vocals; he’s circling around a standard, coming back to the base of a conversational but elevated tone time and time again, keeping the listener engaged on a unique level. On [Untitled], Weiss takes his vocal work to fresh feeling heights, too — the whole record opens with a track that features his screams. He’s got a strikingly wide range.
Next to Weiss, the other members of mewithoutYou have perfected backing Weiss up while at the same time standing fully and competently on their own. The band’s music feels like a conversation as much as the frontman’s vocals deliver that vibe, and it makes for a work in [Untitled] that draws the listener in from the moment they push play. There’s no escaping the personality and the force of the music on the record. At the same time, the band maintains a draw and an expansive, exploratory nature, accomplishing with sparing careful instrumentals what some artists use a lot more to enact.
They’ve kept this up over well over a dozen years and into what’s now their seventh full length album, a point it goes without saying that many artists don’t get to. Before that point, many musicians go off to something else, putting their work out under a different moniker or redirecting themselves through some other means — not mewithoutYou, though. They’re still drawing from the well of their inspiration, having now presented the remarkably varied [Untitled] to the world.
5/5 Stars
Listen below, via Bandcamp
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