5/10/2023 0 Comments Time for change band![]() When I asked the band’s bassist, Greg Jehanian, what it had been like to be associated with the Christian music scene despite most of the band’s members seemingly not identifying as evangelicals themselves, he called the notion of a band being Christian “a bizarre concept.” In the twenty-plus years I’ve been writing about the bands who have been tagged with this appellation, I’ve never known one that reveled in its ambiguity as much as mewithoutYou. While the long trotted-out debate of what exactly makes a band Christian may have been put to bed long ago-the writer Keaton Lamle once pinpointed it as the time Jon Foreman of Switchfoot told a journalist his band was “Christian by faith, not by genre”-it’s a label that’s never sat well with many of the bands who have been involved in what tends to be known as “Christian rock.” MewithoutYou didn’t really feel like an evangelical band at this point, though simply releasing records on Tooth and Nail usually pins that label to a group regardless of their intentions. And unlike many albums of its ilk, it often sidestepped the now-cliché “is this about God or a girl?” question by describing searching for God due to being in the depths of unrequited romantic despair. Its first album, the angular and aggressive Life (2002), was a breakup album tinged with faith. MewithoutYou came to prominence in the mid-2000s during what some call the golden age of Tooth and Nail records, the Seattle-based indie record label most closely associated with Christian independent rock for the last thirty years.Īt first glance, the band was seemingly peers with other rising stars in the Christian screamo scene, like the bands Emery and Underoath, though its particular brand of fractured post-punk fronted by Weiss’s unhinged, spoken/screamed poetry made the band unique. “I don’t begrudge anyone if they would like to have a kind of a tombstone to give it a lifespan, but it’s a very arbitrary way of looking at whatever it is that we are.” To me it feels very artificial,” he said in an interview. We never existed to begin with, and yet we will continue to exist in another respect after our last show has been played.” Both live shows sold out in Philadelphia, their hometown, but are available via livestream on the web.Īsk the band’s singer, Aaron Weiss (whom critics are legally required to refer to as “enigmatic”) what the end of mewithoutYou means to him, and he’ll tell you, “We aren’t breaking up. I mean, yes, there’s a group of men who have been playing music under this name for the last 20 years, who recently announced their intention to disband, and who will play the first two of a hoped-for series of farewell shows this weekend. ![]() ![]() Then again, there’s no such thing as a Christian band, and mewithoutYou doesn’t actually exist. There has never been a Christian band like mewithoutYou.
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