2 out of 5

Label: Run For Cover Records

Produced by: Will Yip

Many moons ago, Chevelle released Point #1, coming across as maybe a Tool knockoff, but more punk inclined, and more accessible than some of that band’s post-Sober work. The album shot to the top of my “you’ve gotta hear this” list, and I waited eagerly for their followup, only for that followup to be Wonder What’s Next, which essentially co-opted all the nu-metal nonsense happening at the time. Great.

But they were still Chevelle, so it wasn’t bad, just not Point #1. I hung on. And the group bounced around for a couple releases thereafter, getting – to my ear – better and better, before eventually reemerging as an all-timer, succeeding on their original sound with all they’d learned and more. My patience was rewarded.

A similar number of moons ago, mewithoutYou released [A –> B] Life and damn; some indulgences aside, this was the hardcore punk record I’d always wanted: intense but with a willingness to post-punk explore; literate but cut with enough raw emotion to hit hard across the board. “You gotta hear this,” I said, and waited eagerly for their followup.

Catch Us For the Foxes, recorded by pop rock maestro Brad Wood, was really good – a streamlining of their punk sound – but was also a little off from what I wanted due to the same. It was still mewithoutYou, though, so I hung in there.

…And essentially heard the band get further and further away from what I’d initially dug. I’d do my dilligence to give albums their due, but it was rarely immediate outside some singles, though Pale Horses was an appreciated return to some more direct intensity.

All to say that, in short, this hasn’t been my band for a while. There’s a lot of love out there for mwY, and for this EP – preceding their final album – in particular. And I don’t want to / can’t discount that. If you connected with Aaron Weiss’ trembling vocal delivery; and lyrical tendency toward religious text allusions via parables with animals; and songs’ swings towards lush instrumentation over a core, meaty melody and beat; well, most of that remains. If you’re already a fan, you will like this EP too, and find its subdued take on the above as a fitting farewell.

If you’re new to mwY, this is darling, delicate work. Weiss recorded separate from his rhythm section; as a new family man at the time, the lyrics skew slightly more confessional in their morality questionings, and he plays and sings in a gentle, bedtime style. Bandmates matched this with a misleadlingly cool and collected style that hides a fair amount of layering. We never quite get those big emergences of beats or emotion, but it’s all scaled down, which allows for some playful explorations of singer-songwriter pop, or Wilco-like folk-adjacent tunes.

It’s pretty.

It’s also unremarkable. The other effect on Weiss’ writing is that the narratives become incredibly open-ended, to the point of lacking impact. And excepting, perhaps, mid-EP Cities Of The Plain, which has the space to evolve from acoustics to a full band’s warmth, the songs here are rather bare. If you don’t know Weiss, his vocals are, y’know, kind-hearted, but he’s not welling up to anything; the mwY melodies – often a kind of playful and edgy jaunt – haunt the background but are rarely pushed very far; most songs feel like they end without much evolution on an idea.

And then we come to me, or my type of listener: hanging on to some admittedly long gone style of the band, surviving on genuinely good songwriting and occasional flashes from the old times. It has often taken me a while to, but I’ve at very least enjoyed and appreciated every mwY album to this point. [untitled], though, simply doesn’t sound like the band at all, really. I accept that it’s a farewell release, and also an EP – a place to experiment – but it’s more that this is a singer-songwriter version of the group, or an easy-listening variant. After multiple spins I had moved past a general feeling of tedium, but this is the group fully “matured,” I guess, with outside lives and families now occupying their thoughts, and doing this composing in separate studio bits with a kind of wistfulness that’s produced technically good, but lacking – to my kind of listener – any real uniquely compelling qualities, softening the things I’m there for to a point of my disinterest.