3 out of 5

Label: Tooth and Nail

Producer: Brad Wood

Transition point.

So a billion years ago, some snotty young Christian upstarts pushed through some J.Robbins’ production to deliver a pretty impressive album of punky/hardcore narratives on faith and friendship and relationships.  Undoubtedly influenced by Jawbox and bands from that scene, the group managed to define itself thanks in no small part to the passionately deranged performance of leader singer Aaron Weiss.

A million years later and the band – which you wouldn’t be looked down upon for having assumed was kaput by that point – reemerged as a more mature outfit, guided by Brad Wood to embellish their pomp and emo grandness a bit.  The lyrics become a bit more cryptic; Aaron is just as enthused but his temperament varies.

If you looked to now, with the band having worked with Daniel Smith and Weiss jumping full into Biblical allusions, chasing album-length extended metaphors dedicated to animal imagery, a follower of the band can hear the threads that started on A => B Life, but a newbie might guess that the jangly weirdness of the group’s current incarnation is not a band that would’ve dropped a screamo disc.  So you hand them Brother, Sister, and the picture can be extrapolated from there.  We get Weiss’ new whiney croon – though occasionally still exploding into throaty shouts, such as on ‘Wolf Am I! (And Shadow)’ – and though the songs aren’t yet fully transition to parables, there’s much more story and structure and a sense of an overall narrative.  Now I dig mwY, but I also find that they’re prone to their indulgences, and that peeked its nose around the corner here as well.  ‘A Glass Can Only Spill What It Contains’ is a nicely digestible image, but the four songs prior to that pack such a punch (ending on a sweetly quiet note with the first of three ‘Spider’ tracks) that the shimmering guitar lead in feels less like a calm before a storm and more like a step back.  The album from this point on gets stuck in that mode, going Tripping Daisy style and redoing a first-album song (‘Nice and Blue’) but the results are questionable and unclear, versus TD’s self-titled album cover of ‘Bill’s ‘One Through Four’ where the remake was an entirely different song by an entirely different band – mewithoutYou’s take on the concept is good if you haven’t heard the track before, but they do it up primarily the same, just a little less plugged in, so it feels somewhat like filler to my ears.

Still, there are successes toward the tail end of the disc – Jeremy Enigk already turned in a rockin’ guest spot on track 2, and then comes back (sort of a rarity in the guest spot world) for a more important role in ‘O Porcupine,’ sounding enthused and connected to the track instead of just contributing soaring background hooks.

‘Brother, Sister’ is perhaps the least satisfying mwY album because it’s a little half-in half-out.  There’s an EP worth of raw material in tracks 1-4, and then the disc sort of fails at transitioning to the more glammed out style of the following albums, the group perhaps wanting to prove that they were capable of stretching but worried to fully leave some of the tough guy posturing behind.  Sandwiched between stronger songs, everything on this album is better than your average joe rock track, but sequenced as it is, things blend together.  Best experienced in order of that band’s releases.