People said they were Christians, but they were also freaks. They toured in a 42-foot 1976 MC8 Charter bus that ran on vegetable oil. They crashed on people’s floors and ate out of dumpsters. They performed regularly at Cornerstone (the Coachella of Christian rock), released music on Tooth & Nail Records (the Geffen Records of Christian rock), and their CDs were carried in evangelical Christian bookstores. But when I first saw mewithoutYou in the summer of 2008, the band was traveling with people that looked to me like hippies, men in long dresses and women with dreadlocks playing bagpipes and accordions, dancing around the stage like a circus, chanting praise to Allah. When I spoke with lead singer Aaron Weiss after the show, his massively oversized t-shirt with a daisy on it soaked with sweat, he told me that our bodies are like these T-shirts, just costumes that we put on, and if our spirits changed bodies, it would just be like if he and I traded T-shirts. I nodded, bewildered. This was a Christian band that made no sense to me as a teenager raised on Sunday sermons and Wednesday night youth group services. This was something else entirely.

I am writing this on the 10th anniversary of their sixth album, Pale Horses, because I believe that this band, and this album in particular, is still perplexingly overlooked and under-discussed. Part of the reason for this is that it’s hard to explain the band’s appeal. They’re hard to contextualize. Most people just don’t know what their deal is. mewithoutYou appears only sporadically in this fine publication, despite a 20+ year career opening for bands like Cursive and the Dismemberment Plan. One of their songs is namechecked in a 2014 list of 30 songs from the golden era of emo, and there’s a few honorable mentions of their new music in the postscripts of articles about other Songs/Albums of the Week. The only real dedicated coverage came in 2022 in write-ups of the band’s farewell tour.

This lack of coverage is actually really understandable despite the band’s devoted fanbase and absolutely relentless touring (Setlist.FM has over 1400 shows logged, hundreds more than Cursive or the Dismemberment Plan or Sunny Day Real Estate or Paramore – just to name a few bands they’ve played or collaborated with). They were too sincere and too explicitly religious to have any cultural cachet in the ironic aughts. Their most popular album, and the one many still consider to be their defining work, Brother, Sister, does not even have a Metacritic page despite peaking at #116 on the Billboard Top 200. The first review of the album when you Google it comes from JesusFreakHideout (the Pitchfork of Christian rock). They didn’t get an actual Pitchfork review until 2015 — for Pale Horses, in fact. To this day, they only appear in Rolling Stone as passing mentions in two interviews, one with La Dispute and one with avowed mewithoutYou superfan Hayley Williams.

Whether or not they’re a “Christian band” is a conversation that is as boring as it fruitless, but they’re certainly, incontrovertibly, a religious band. God is the most frequent topic and most frequently addressed audience, and scriptures and religious imagery fill the lines of mewithoutYou’s wordy lyric sheets. What makes mewithoutYou different from their peers and labelmates is that they are not in any way evangelical. The commercial luminaries of Christian rock at the time, bands like Relient K and Underoath, sought to convincingly ape their influences while delivering a message about Jesus Christ. The ultimate goal of bands like this is always, in one way or another, to make converts, to draw new souls into the flock through God’s saving grace. It has a form (serviceable reproductions of popular Warped Tour acts) and a function (spreading the Good News).

mewithoutYou’s lyrical preoccupations, on the other hand, are deeply, and in many ways solely, personal. They’re devotional. Much has been made of Weiss’ heterodox spiritual beliefs. The son of a Jewish father and Christian mother who converted together to Sufi Islam, Weiss himself had an ostensible conversion to Christianity in his teens that resulted less in a refinement of his beliefs than an amorphous expansion, pulling in modernist thought, Sufi mysticism, and an wide array of religious scriptures. He constantly quotes poets, authors, spiritual figures, and the Bible. What keeps mewithoutYou’s music from becoming simple philosophic bulkage is a poetic vision that is anchored in Weiss’ own experience, demanding to see the world through his own eyes while seeking to understand what others see.

So if they weren’t a fit with the day’s indie rock and they weren’t meant for the evangelical audience of their own record label, then who the fuck was this band for?

Reader, I am here to humbly suggest that it might be YOU. You might be a lover of literature, and you might be someone who has entertained questions about life’s larger meaning or lack thereof. More importantly, however, you are a fan of Rock Music, of riffs that kick ass, of drums getting hammered to hell, of big damn rock and roll songs. I contend that this is not a niche band for a niche audience, but instead simply a good ass rock band with memorable lyrics and great guitars. You might be part of the audience the band didn’t find in their run, and now, on the 10th anniversary of Pale Horses, they might finally connect with.

The band’s preoccupations are specific and well-established, but the way they approach them never fails to transform the arcane and obscure into something universal, moving, and often quite funny. Their song “C-Minor” has one of their most compelling stanzas of spiritual reflection — “All the neighborhood watched a fire burn from where they stood as the smoke said ‘We’re not half as bad as G-d is good'” — followed immediately by one of his funniest bits of self-deprecation: “I’m still (ehh… technically…) a virgin/ After 27 years/ Which never bothered me before/ What’s maybe 50 more?” The loftiest spiritual thought is necessarily tied to our basest human experiences, and it’s his willingness to navigate both at all times is what makes his writing fascinating and compelling. He has many more profound moments, but it’s the parts that make me laugh that catch me by surprise every time.

By the time Pale Horses was released, mewithoutYou had been a band for 15 years. Their earliest incarnation (everything up through 2002’s [A→B] Life) could best be described as post-hardcore, although Weiss’ vocals — alternating between spoken word and frantic shouting — resembled very little in hardcore at the time. By 2006’s Brother, Sister, however, mewithoutYou had morphed into a idiosyncratic blend of indie rock, folk, and post-hardcore that coiled around itself, sinewy riffs lashing out over thundering drums as Weiss continued his evolution into wide-eyed street preacher. It’s considered by many (including the internet’s busiest music nerd) to be their masterwork.

Arriving nearly a decade later, Pale Horses has been called a return to form, and it does have passing similarities to Brother, Sister and 2004’s Catch For Us The Foxes: songs propelled by aggressive guitars and Weiss’ dense, unbroken stream of words. However, ultimately what these comparisons boil down to is that the band stripped away the whimsical folk that had defined their previous two albums, the acoustic guitar-driven It’s All Crazy! It’s All False! It’s All A Dream! It’s Alright, and the poppier Ten Stories. Both albums are rife with talking animals and retellings of fables and fairy tales. On one hand, charming folk feels like an appropriate canvas for these dreamlike, childlike stories; on the other, there was less urgency. Both albums are beloved by fans, but neither one captures the best of mewithoutYou’s music.

Pale Horses and the band’s 2018 swan song [untitled], then, represent the aforementioned return to form, more traditionally rock-oriented with fewer campfire singalongs. Many fans I knew drifted away during this period. The band seemed to have settled into a single mode after a period of exploration, instead mining their own style to find a more ideal version, perfecting the core of what they set out to do. They weren’t expanding outward as much as they were digging down deeper. Reviews were positive, but anecdotally, I saw less fervor from fans. The band had become elder statesmen, delivering consistent iterations of their sound without too much interest in further innovation. I was one of the fans that thought this way.

In the years since, especially in the three years since the band’s final farewell, I have realized that I was wrong. Pale Horses, in particular, is not a retread of anything. It’s the band finding, after many attempts, the pure vein that runs through the heart of all their music. It is standing shouting into the storm, holding up a mirror to the divine because, as Weiss once said, “Lord, I could never show you anything as beautiful as You.” It is the process of finding pure beauty in an incomprehensible existence. It is the impossibility of certainty, but it is certain that treating all experience with wonder imbues it with meaning.

The title track is a heralding, a distant but portentous cloud of smoke. It drifts along prettily on spacious delayed guitars that hang above Weiss’ gentle, contemplative murmur. Pale Horses is consumed with images of Christian apocalypse, the end of days foretold in the last book of the Bible, Revelation. There’s a smoky red horizon stretched across the album, a coming doom that paradoxically presents opportunities for hope. “Death where is thy sting?” Weiss sings on “Blue Hen,” quoting the Bible, referencing the Christian idea of resurrection and eternal life that makes death nothing more than a transition from one life to the next. But even he has trouble grasping the magnitude of what he’s repeating: “You ought to put more thought into what you bravely sing,” he wryly admonishes himself.

The album’s second song “Watermelon Ascot” is textbook mewithoutYou song: a searing rocker that splits the difference between post-hardcore and post-rock. This type of song is built on the bob-and-weave interplay between guitarist (and Aaron’s brother) Michael Weiss’ surly riffs and the kinetic churn of the indefatigable rhythm section. The deluxe reissue of death metal titans Death’s 1991 album Human includes, inexplicably, isolated bass and drum tracks for every song. I wish mewithoutYou would do the same for every one of their albums. The unsung motor of their music is the reliably exciting bass and drum grooves, unexpected without overplaying, always finding a way to creatively propel the song, buoyed by stop-start bass melodies. Every time I saw the band (probably 10 times between 2008 and 2022), I was struck afresh by the absolute clinic their drummer was putting on, titanic and tireless.

Despite the uniform excellence of the band’s instrumentalists, singer Aaron Weiss is always center stage, standing alone under a single spotlight that follows him from wing to wing as he roves. On “Mexican War Streets,” he glides effortlessly from the devastatingly personal to the charmingly dorky (“To heck with all the drugs my parents did”), slotting in Dostoevsky quotes, scripture, and queries into the nature of the universe — or at least our understanding of it — before the words are torn from his mouth as the song whirls on: “I tremble at the thought of what’s often referred to as ‘karma.'”

“Mexican War Streets” is 1. one of the best songs in mewithoutYou’s catalog, and 2. a perfect case study of Pale Horses’ obsessions and fixations. Ivy Nelson’s Pitchfork review of Pale Horses quotes Weiss explaining his struggle on the album with language itself: “I’ve just been thinking and reading more about language and words and how hard their meanings are to pin down — even simple words, let alone complex, lofty ones that I’ve long since been fascinated with. So I sort of questioned my ability to communicate anything worthwhile.” Tellingly, many of the modernist poets and authors whose work pushed on the borders of language and challenged the ways it communicates (or fails to) appear throughout the album: Ezra Pound, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot.

These references are intricately threaded together and woven into the album’s imagery. Bridges are used as a motif alternately to illustrate connection or the gap between people. Much like another song obsessed with modernist poets, “Stuck Between Stations” by the Hold Steady, the narrator of “Mexican War Streets” finds himself on a bridge contemplating the water below and what it would mean to plunge into the “rivers of sadness and mutual need.” This song constantly returns to Hart Crane’s “The Bridge,” a rambling epic poem that echoed James Joyce’s stream of consciousness that interrogated, in form and content, the modern condition. Joyce is frequently quoted or paraphrased; the lyric “My will: And those who precede me” is written in the album’s liner notes as “My will: and his will that fronts me ( -James Joyce).” Many lyrics get this treatment: expanded from an oblique reference to a footnoted quote in the liner notes. Weiss echoes the questions of the modernist poets: The world is a mysterious cacophony that we only experience individually. What can we know and how can we know it? The answer is in the mystery or, at least, in the contradiction.

The dense nest of literary quotes, biblical references, and existential pontificating are equally satisfying to explore with a magnifying glass and encyclopedia as they are to shout senselessly, catching only the crest of the idea as Weiss surges up from the depths of reflection to crow searing one-liners: “I’d like to meet whoever said the words we print in red/ With a coin in my teeth on Mexican War Streets.” And that’s the thing. For me, the truly captivating part of mewithoutYou’s body of work is the dizzying depths, the flowering branches of literature and scripture and poetry that form a garden maze for Weiss to sprint through chasing anthropomorphic animals and foods — a Redwall novel that takes place in a haunted Garden of Eden. Watership Down written by Mark Z. Danielewski.

However, I’d wager the majority of mewithoutYou fans don’t listen to their music with the band’s Genius page pulled up or their dog-eared Holman reference Bible at hand. You don’t need to dig to feel the weight of what’s happening. The engine that animates the band’s best work is not decoding the answers but exploring how even the most profound answers are found wanting, and the way through the darkness often depends less on your ability to comprehend what’s happening than on your ability to embrace being carried by the waves.

mewithoutYou’s music is elliptical. Many songs have a sequel that repurposes the original’s chords and melodies: “January 1979” and “February, 1878”; “Bullet To Binary” and “Bullet To Binary (Pt. Two); “C-Minor” and “D-Minor.” Questions are asked over and over as if to illustrate the lack of an answer. On Brother, Sister highlight “A Glass Can Only Spill What It Contains,” Weiss bellows “WHAT NEW MYSTERY IS THIS”; it’s a question, rhetorical-but-not-rhetorical, that he returns to over and over again. On “Wolf Am I! (And Shadow),” he asks meekly, voice barely above a whisper, “What’s really going on here?”

On Pale Horses, the same preoccupations are on display. In a 2015 interview, Weiss said about the album, “This time around, I tried to own up to the depths of my dissatisfaction with religion, but also the depths of my love for religion. It’s kind of inconsistent internally…It’s not clear and it’s not coherent, but it’s all in there.” What he has to say about religion and his experience of it is inherently contradictory, but it only means something if he includes all of it.

Pale Horses never fully returns to mewithoutYou’s early jagged hardcore, not for longer than the chorus of “Red Cow,” but as “Mexican War Streets” illustrates, they never fully depart from what you could call post-hardcore. Almost every song on the album finds time for muscular minor key progressions and explosive angst, Weiss ranting until he works himself into a froth, huge stomping guitar riffs forming the emotional climax. But the key descriptor for mewithoutYou’s music for the lion’s share of their career was beautiful. “Dorothy” is a gentle, haunting ballad narrating surreal dreams that feels like a centerpiece of the album despite being barely a minute-and-a-half long. “Magic Lantern Days” shimmers as Weiss croons, paraphrasing Bukowski and referencing Chernobyl as he narrates the journey of the three Wise Men to the place where their infant savior lies in a manger. The darkness inherent in the human condition only serves to sharpen the points of light until they’re impossible to ignore, until they can be seen from the deepest well, from leagues under the ocean.

The title Pale Horses is a reference to the harbingers of the final apocalypse. The album’s closing song “Rainbow Signs” depicts this apocalypse beginning to unfold, but the title itself references the rainbow God placed in the sky after Noah’s flood, a visible promise He made with mankind to never end the world with water again. Is His final judgement of all consuming fire a betrayal of His promise, or simply the fulfillment of what He always said would happen? Weiss grimly recounts the future foretold in Scripture: “The sky I’d been told/ Would roll up like a scroll/ As the mountains and islands moved from their place/ And the sun would turn black/ As a dead raven’s back/ But there’d but nowhere to hide/ From the Judge’s face.” But at the song’s end, he turns his eyes away from the heavens, from the sky rolling up like a scroll. He dreams that he has turned into his father, and he clasps his own hand.

The only way to face what comes for all of us is not inside us; it is found in the connection between us, hand in hand with those who came before us and those who love us. If there is an answer, it’s a joke that two people share, a personal secret that links them like clasped hands: “Let’s keep that silly punchline between you and me.”

It was a very conscious choice to make a last-minute turn from the apocalyptic to the intimate and personal. In that 2015 interview, Weiss lays out his reasoning: “A lot of this other stuff, writing about God, or love or judgment, it feels pretty deeply out of my league, pretty thoroughly a point of absolute ignorance for me. To try and write about God and say anything seems almost preposterous at this point, as if I speak from a point of knowledge. Of course I can share my experiences and my faith, but I can’t tell people what’s true when I don’t know what’s true. But I can sing about my relationship with my dad with some conviction and some sense of knowledge, because it’s not a thing that I know, like a proposition or a fact. It’s just a relationship that I experienced and I still experience.”

What keeps me coming back to this band, although my spiritual journey led me out of evangelical Christianity many years ago, is the feeling that Weiss and I are sharing a moment like this: a moment of profundity that feels absurd, a small private moment of connection that doesn’t eliminate the need for bigger answers, but it makes asking them less frightening. We sit together like children in fear and trembling and wonder — as Weiss says on “Blue Hen,” like “Cousins on the swingset, rabbits in the grass.” It’s a relationship that I experienced and I still experience.