1: Screams and Whispers

It’s a strange thing, getting into a band just as they’re breaking up. I’m usually much earlier or much later: I’ll start listening to an artist just as they’re hitting their peak, or I’ll find them long after the band broke up. This past Tuesday, I went to the first show in mewithoutYou’s farewell tour. I’ve been aware of the band for a very long time—my husband has a lot of their albums on vinyl—but I have only passing familiarity with their music. I can recognize their songs, but I can’t sing you any of their lyrics.

This is partly by design, I’m sure. MewithoutYou sidles up to hardcore, shakes hands with it, and then whirls away towards some other, more playful genre. Their melodies are aggressively intricate. Some of their songs are in 6/8 timing. Almost half their lyrics are spoken, or mumbled, or whispered, and a significant portion of the rest are screamed. They’re meant to be felt, not understood. The words I can pick out (and the ones I’ve looked up online) remain opaque. Frontman and songwriter Aaron Weiss writes about fables and mysticism, folding references to Judaism and Christianity and Sufi Islam into his songs. He’s content to stand in religious fluidity. And for the past few years, I’ve been content, until now, to listen to his band in passing.

Tuesday evening was a little different. (I never go to shows on Tuesdays.) I stood on the sidelines, a few other people safely between me and the pit, and I listened to a band play songs that they’ve played countless times while the crowd moved around me. I knew, and the crowd and the band knew, that these songs have only a few more iterations left to be played. I felt a tug of affection toward this band of men that I don’t know, whose names I needed to look up as I wrote this post. They’d tied bouquets of flowers to every mic stand on stage, and to the drum set. Condensation dripped from the ductwork poking out of the ceiling three stories above me, and my shirt stuck to me in the humidity. I swayed a little, nodding along as the frontman screamed his lungs out to a hardcore song in waltz timing, watching the crowd around me scream the words right back at him, and I felt sad that I’d missed all the past shows, and I felt grateful that I got to see the first of the last.

What I talked about:

On this week’s episode of the Seeing & Believing podcast, we reviewed Jane Schoenbrun’s terrific debut We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. My cohost Kevin and I also discussed the original Footloose (I’ve seen it before, he hadn’t). I love this movie for its earnest exuberance and the thin dark streak running through it. Kevin didn’t love the structure of the film, so we broke it down together.

What I’m reading:

I’m about halfway through David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon, which I picked up earlier this year because I wanted to get ahead of Martin Scorsese’s adaptation, due out this fall. It’s pretty good! It’s much less focused on the details of the Osage murders, and much more interested in a top-level history of the procedure work involved in solving the case. I’m holding it at arms’ length—I’m not a true crime person—but I appreciate the window into a series of crimes that helped shape the FBI into the department it is today.

What I’m listening to:

My day job has been writing-intensive lately, which means my podcast queue is more or less on hold. That said, I’ve managed to carve out time for Jamie Loftus’ excellent Ghost Church podcast, which explores the history and current state of the American Spiritualist religion. She’s curious and thoughtful, up-front about her biases and unapologetic about including her personal connection to the story.

I also managed to give my writing playlist a facelift—the better to put my head down and focus on work. It’s over 27 hours long, stuffed with film scores and piano and a few crunchy synths for texture. If that sounds like your thing, you can give it a shuffle here.