100 Albums That Make Me Love Music - 48. Mewithoutyout: It's All Crazy! It's All False! It's All A Dream! It's Alright!

48. mewithoutyou: It’s All Crazy! It’s All False! It’s All A Dream! It’s Alright!

I remember the first time I heard mewithoutyou their weird screaming poetry over indie rock sound immediately captivated me and I fell in love with their style. So when I bought their third album Brother, Sister I was very confused to find that their screaming was gone and their heavy sounds were more folky than anything else. That being said I didn’t dislike the change... it was just different and unexpected. Somehow that didn’t prepare me for their next stage on their 4th album. 

I bought It’s All Crazy! It’s All False! It’s All A Dream! It’s Alright! without hearing a single track off it. The only thing I knew about this album was that it was going to be “folkier” and produced by Daniel Smith of the Danielson Familie (one of my guilty pleasures), needless to say I knew I was going to like the album so what was the point of hearing tracks out of context? The best part of the mewithoutyou experience is hearing the whole album at once as the songs mix into each other creating a 45 minute song instead of 12 individual tracks. That being said this album doesn’t do that at all.

There is an element of story still, but in the context of individual parables (mostly from the perspective of various animals). The only single “The Fox, The Crow and The Cookie” is such a fun blend of folk and Indie rock with amazing sing-along lines, weird instrumentations and falsetto vocals (one of many background vocals added by Daniel Smith) that it’s hard to believe this was the band that gave us Catch For Us The Foxes a few years earlier.

The experimental instrumentations and melodies are what really grabbed me on this record. They take simple lyrics (or la la’s) but put a nice twist to them. The song Timothy Hay is a gorgeous and upbeat song which ends with a beautiful repetition of “What a beautiful God, what a beautiful god, What a beautiful god there must be!” 

That album also is one of the most religiously explicit album the Indie rockers have ever put out ending on the song Allah Allah Allah which simplifies their religious beliefs and the bands personal desire to accept everyone (singing ‘it doesn’t matter what you’ve done’). The album always manages to put a smile on my face, makes me want to roll down the windows and sing-along as loud as I can, not bad for an extremely spiritual folk album from a former post-hardcore band.