Ten Stories

On May 15th mewithoutYou released their new album “Ten Stories.” For many old mewithoutYou fans the album is a welcome return to their former raucous sound. Their previous 2009 album, “It’s All Crazy, It’s All False, It’s All a Dream, But It’s Allright” was a strange departure into the land of Danielson like sounds, featuring a plenitude of folk songs by frontman Aaron Weiss about animals, one might even say, too many. “Ten Stories” still includes the animal references and fables (the entire album focusing around a circus train crash in Montana in the late 1800’s) but refocuses on the sound of mewithoutYou at it’s best—shouting, hard drum beats, and heavy guitar. Make no mistake, if you like the sound of the previous album, there’s still a couple songs for you, like “Grist for the Malady Mill,” “Elephant in the Dock,” and “Cardiff Giant,” (the only sub-par song on the entire album) but largely the album returns to a more natural mewithoutYou sound. Lyrically, mewithoutYou has never been better. Aaron Weiss’s lyrics are complex, poetic fables, but still retain a fairy-tailish simplicity. The poetic wanderings of Weiss’s continue to make mewithoutYou what they are today. At once confessional and mystic, concrete and wandering. The best song on the album is undoubtedly “Fox’s Dream of the Log Flume,” which not only highlights Aaron’s lyrical genius, but brother Michael’s and Kleinberg’s guitar skills and Mazzota’s wonderful drums. There’s even a Sausurre reference to the sign and signified in the song for the nerdy English majors out there (don’t worry about it). “Provisionally eyed, practically alive,” Weiss sings “Mistook sign for signified, and so sins have tried to run him off a cliff like Gadarene swine.” The other great songs are “February 1878,” the circular “All Circles” and “Nine Stories.” If only the whole album sounded like “Fox’s Dream” and “Febuary 1878.” But Aaron has mentioned that he is tired of writing angsty songs his grandma can’t listen to. Understandable, but in many ways the angst is missed, and I’m still waiting for an opportunity for Michael Weiss, Greg Jehanian, Chris Kleinberg and Ricky Mazzotta to really hit it hard and go crazy, like they do on their live shows. “Ten Stories” is not quite like “Catch for us the Foxes,” and it is certainly not “A>B” but it is a much-welcomed return to what makes mewithoutYou great. The band has been around now for ten years and went their separate ways after “It’s All Crazy,” only to come back for “Ten Stories.” The distance they spent apart and their recent reunion and commitment to each other heavily characterize the album. As Mazzotta says, “When we came together to make Ten Stories, it was spawned out of being apart for awhile, home with friends and lovers, pursuing other interests and naturally gravitating back towards one another through sound and space.” The album also features amazing artwork by artist Vasily Kafanov.