It’s All Crazy, It’s All False 9 comments

By Joel Hartse

I think I’ll just have to tell the truth: the first time I woke up in a Muslim country, I was terrified. And not of fundamentalist militias or mujahedeen, but music. This was unlike the morning reckoning one gets used to while away from home (wait, this isn’t my bed, this isn’t my room, this isn’t my—oh, OK, right).

Although I was indeed unfamiliar with the experience of waking up on the 30th floor of a luxury condo in Kuala Lumpur, I was equally unfamiliar—or more, somehow—with the experience of being pulled from sleep by the adhan, the Muslim call to prayer, sung in a language I do not know, a scale dissonant to my ears. The notes were long, and they fell in unsettlingly gorgeous semi-tones.

I’ve heard that lions will flee the sound of clapping hands because it is utterly unknown, and therefore frightening, to them. I think I get it. That morning, my body became tense, somehow instinctually on alert, because I had never heard these sounds before and knew they were not for me.

Except when the song was over, I knew I wanted to hear it again.

Coincidentally this is the same way I felt the first time I hear the Pennsylvania rock band mewithoutYou, driving home from work in Seattle some years ago. On my Subaru’s radio, Aaron Weiss came unhinged, bleating “Why pluck one string when you can STRUM THE GUITAR! STRUM THE GUITAR! STRUM THE GUITAR! STRUM THE GUITAR!”

Seriously? I thought. But I bought the record, and grew to love it.

mewithoutYou are not really a band for grownups—their first record is mostly screaming, and while its earnest spiritual and sexual angst is refreshing (especially for an album released by a Christian record label), it isn’t the kind of thing you want to listen to unless you’re in the mood for it, or are seventeen years old and misunderstood by everyone you know.

For most of the band’s career, Aaron Weiss didn’t sing—he yelled, slurred, mumbled over the top of hypnotic and angular post-rock. Their first three albums are mostly about the search for God (obviously, the band’s name is significant here), the loneliness of life and our need for each other, and the mystery of love (all kinds—on one track, Weiss jokingly sings “I’m still technically a virgin after twenty-seven years”).

The songs are compelling, nakedly emotional, and, surprisingly, shot through with Muslim sensibility. To hear a band born out of the American Evangelical Christian rock scene sing in Arabic (which they do from time to time), to quote Rumi and refer to God as Allah, is both jarring and beautiful.

mewithoutYou’s newest record, which will be released later this month, bears the unsubtle title It’s All Crazy! It’s All False! It’s All a Dream! It’s Alright, words which come from the Sufi mystic Bawa Muhaiyaddeen. The album is not as aggressive, sonically, as their previous output—it is instead pastoral, gentle, childlike, and sung.

It’s still pretty weird, having been produced by Daniel Smith, founder of the Danielson Famile and mastermind of bizarro outsider Christian rock—but the album is comfortable in its skin, comfortable in a world where we sometimes don’t know why we believe the things we do, where we try to make sense of others and their beliefs, where God and Love seem the only truths worth hanging onto.

It’s All Crazy is a challenging and rewarding album, and is going to make some people uncomfortable at first, because it kind of sounds like a post-punk-folk-rock record about vegetables and forgiveness and Jesus and Allah, made by people who are really into flowers and eating food they find in the garbage, because that is pretty much what it is. And that is something I have not heard before, and that is why I want to hear it again.