WHAT RULES WEDNESDAY

It was a DVD that came in a Solid State Records sampler in the dawn of the 2000’s that first introduced me to mewithoutYou. The music video for “Bullet to Binary” loosened something in me. I was on a warpath against anything that even smelled like singing. I wanted straight screaming and breakdowns all of the time. But then Aaron and the band, dressed like people getting off of a train, thrashed and rattled in a way that I never returned from. mewithoutYou captured every part of my musical understanding to that point and reintroduced me to music by expanding the opportunity for everything to feel like something, and sound like something outside of my concrete block understanding of how much I could heave underneath.

The avalanche of a band releasing album after album of life defining moments for me somehow never ended.

Still hasn’t.

mewithoutYou “ended” in 2022, but just like the concepts of their songs tangled in the reality of what existing even means, they somehow continue on, like phantom tentacles, never releasing the grip of the genius that has always been why I stay with them. I’ll follow the trail as long as they even have a match lit in the dark, and I’ll offer to keep carrying the fire if they truly stop moving.

There’s been vinyl releases, merch releases, midnight announcements, B-sides, prayers and hopes for a reuniting. But now we have “Live, (vol. One.)” To follow mewithoutYou is to have seen them endlessly in rooms painted with sweat and shout. I went every time they were in a city I was in. I went without expectation, because it was always a momentary experience unlike what had been, and certainly not the same as what would be. I remember Aaron with the flowers on the microphone stand after “Catch For Us The Foxes,” released, moving like ocean water in a pool. (Listen for when Aaron references the flowers!) I remember standing in a tiny room as Aaron returned to the stage for a teaspoon of an encore where “Yellow Spider” was introduced for the first time to me in an acoustic lullaby previewing “Brother, Sister.” An album I did not know yet, or realize would become the crown jewel of my albums of all time list, shortly after. I remember a time when the band barreled through what felt like the entirety of the first 5 albums in the span of an hour, projecting every song into a loud, fast version back to back to back. Almost an unrecognizable opportunity to hear it all like a fire in a field nearing the neighborhood fences. I remember finding ways to rearrange plans so I could make it to one more show while they were in town later into their career. And it was always worth the drive, costs, plans because it never ended. It never changed while also changing completely.

mewithoutYou always appeared, but where would we go?

To watch mewithoutYou complete a piece of their discography by nodding to the live experience feels like relief. To have a genuine recorded revisiting of otherwise faded memories means so much to all of us that got our feet stepped on to watch Mike calculate every guitar part, while his brother tore everyone’s hearts out of their shirts. To stand in a room and witness Rickie ACTUALLY play these beats he designed in person. HE ACTUALLY PLAYS THE DRUMS LIKE THIS!!! To watch other people try to solve the tortoise’s words in “Goodbye, I,” or sway into a sleepy trance as “Carousels” somehow interrupted the churning tires of an otherwise firework celebration of a set, spitting ash and color all over everyone’s nice, new shirts they picked to attend a concert, and ended up in another dimension.

“Live, (vol. One)” kicks off with an exceptionally mean version of “Bullet to Binary,” which for a person that was once a kid being initially introduced to this band with this same song decades ago, feels like something. Something nostalgic in the painful way looking at an old holiday catalogue numbly hurts for the simple time when your Dad still locked the door while you were already sleeping. On my first few listens, on Bandcamp of course, because streaming services fumbled one of the most important releases of the year, there were no song titles. Just “Song #1, Song #2…” It’s intentional, but again streaming services ruined it by naming the tracks. The faceless track list feels like going to a mewithoutYou show, (experience?,) it’s more of an experience. Your tracking a massive catalogue in this souped up version the band brings with momentary jams to stretch an especially loud, or quiet thought for the people in the room, and this will never happen just like this again. Worms dig tunnels, but they have their own slight angles every time, we just can’t see them normally.

With a strong handful of very old and very new songs layered like cake in a plastic ring, the expanse of this band’s career comes fast and bludgeons any kind of table manner. It’s a well curated free for all. As the album kicks along some of the harsh angles of the early tracks on the album find some smoothing into really well recreated live versions of the original album recordings, but the moments when Aaron lets loose like a lion in a dinnerware shop is why I keep listening. I want to hear mewithoutYou in the most visceral and troubled, because I was visceral and troubled when I first heard “Tie Me Up! Untie Me!”

Sleigh bells ring, Rickie’s drums lock like always, there’s a whistling solo, Aaron the singer, Aaron the shouter, Aaron the thinker, Aaron the mysterious ringleader behind a curtain of quietly not wanting to lead any rings all appear and disappear throughout.

This piece of music grips and lets go for over an hour but the flow and change of songs moves so easily, it feels like it’s slipping away faster then the timeframe that it actually considers.

I want to write about the part where Aaron says “Shhhh…” and then what happens, but you’ll find it.

I want to capture what it feels like to hear the crowd singing along to “Timothy Hay,” but maybe it’s because I’ve been in that crowd, so if you’ve been there, you’ll hear it and know what I can’t exactly put words to.

The instrumental part in “Disaster Tourism” holds a few more creases than the recording, but if you don’t know that part that well, it will just pass by. I say that to say, this album is accessible and open to EVERYONE, but the deeper you know this band, the more you’ll enjoy the tiny details and decisions to feature parts of one specific recording over another. Finishing the album with “Four Fires” as a direct example of a deep listener choice.

This feels just like mewithoutYou at their most polished and loose all at once. Kind of the way a sweater with a suit would look at the final bow of a darkening stage. It’s an experience, it’s a live album, it’s visiting with old friends, it’s looking at a map that’s designing itself as your vision reaches the farther regions of the land being drawn without a hand.

I featured this album on our most recent New Music Friday Guide and someone had never heard mewithoutYou and started with this album. As a beginning listener this person was IMMEDIATELY drawn in, and I had the wonderful opportunity to tell them about the discography they could start at the beginning of, an experience of so much more.

This is a companion piece to a career of meticulous recordings in a setting they best became what we all know about them. Animals in cages, releasing themselves from the cages to prowl around the grounds of a world full of gardens and trash and become new animals.

Listen to it.

Joni’s voice moves like the color change on a snake’s skin. Or the way sunlight sways on river water.

The picking strings, and melody of these songs hold enough to make this all excel, but the feeling in the way a chorus of singing, “again” over and over actually feels like a pain in repetition comes from the delivery of the voice.

I wasn’t familiar with Joni, but saw Keeled Scales and Hand In Hive make a decision and follow whatever they do. Driving, I put this EP on, and immediately realized a late visitor to the best songs of 2024 was filling the car, as the title track unspooled.

There’s a haze and torment in the production, a polished gloss on words haunting a situation Joni forms with each note. A breakup that splinters into a heavy hearted yearning for someone fading into the back of a mirror.

What could simply work as a few minutes of strumming, evolves into a gentle brush of guitars processed through a fly swatter, edges on the corners of Joni’s soft voice curling like tinges of yellow smoke on wallpaper.

The tiny hammers mining gems on the keyboard of “Your Girl,” add just enough secret detail to pair with the shreds of guitar slapping like an alligator’s tail along water becoming ice.

It’s an unsolvable heartache as the opening lines spread out, “Say it’s all over baby / Better get some rest.” But Joni doesn’t seem to be resting as much as structuring some of the most well developed songs of the year in a tiny EP that could simply pass us all by, here at the end of the year.

It’s an opportunity to grapple in the knee deep waters of never-ending flooding. At least for now.

“Birthday” closes out with an acoustic guitar and Joni’s voice scratching that bristly cloud hanging heavy in the room. It’s an observation of loss without drama, just genuine recognition of how the loss has bored a hole into the fabric of living every day.

(Keeled Scales / Hand In Hive)

Even if I am looking at Peaer’s band name, I struggle to correctly spell it. The pattern of the vowels doesn’t connect in my mind. Peaer as a musical entity does the same in my mind. When I listen I get lost in the subtle choices to write direct and straight forward songs in a way that only Peaer can accomplish the way they do. Nothing is obvious even though it sometimes sounds like it is. Listen to the pattern of the snare hits.

Peter Katz voice sounds like a cat watching out an upstairs window, and yet when the band hits the chords a little hard halfway through, “Just Because,” it doesn’t feel like watching a boat capsize. It dials right to where it needs to. This trio plays with the bridges of the song working in specificity in hits and following each other into calculations of added beats and picked notes to expand the count and time of the song so when the drums go to a straight drive on the chorus it feels like relief, but waiting for more numbers to move into the lens when it quickly ends.

Peaer is precise without showing off. Thom Lombardi and Jeremy Kinney give a whale size backbone to the rhythm and low end so Katz can flutter  guitars and voice into the thinner air of a mountain they built to record this underneath.

It’s patterns like two different fabrics sewn together into a coat warmer than anything store bought. It’s allowing the most gentle of mice hands to drive an entire 18-wheeler through a wall and then back out and continue on a highway coated in fallen leaves.

Peaer returns without blinking, just continuing in a progression Peaer creates, much like how they spell.