In 2007, my last year of university, my friend Hugh posted me a mix cd featuring a load of stuff he'd been listening to at the time (and, for some reason, The Stone Roses). It was a mixture of South Wales bands he was starting to listen to, like Taint and Gunrack?, new discoveries like William Elliott Whitmore, and The Smashing Pumpkins, a band he'd finally conceded were actually very good. Another particular highlight was a band called mewithoutYou - he'd included the song Torches Together from their second album, Catch For Us the Foxes, and I was enjoying it greatly. There were some strong moments on that cd, and the demo of Young Hearts by Gunrack? remains the only version of that song I have, despite it being a truly excellent song. We'd go on to live with Nicky, the singer of Gunrack?, for a year, see Taint more times than I care to count and watch William Elliott Whitmore play an incredible, sold-out 2-hour set in The Globe on a crazy-hot night with pretty much everyone we new in South Wales under the same roof. The cd was strangely precedent of the music that would shape the next two years that I spent living in Cardiff.
In October that year, we were settled in Cardiff and I'd just started my new job. Finally with enough money to start buying music again (it'd been a tight couple of months) I went to Kelly's Records in the market to see what they had that I might like. They had on their perpetual sale of three cds for £15 - not matter what season it was, the same sale existed but with a different season-related name. I was pleased to find a bunch of albums that you wouldn't normally find in record stores (including Fantastic Damage by El-P, which for some reason I agreed to let Hugh have, a decision I still regret). Finally getting to the point, they had a cd copy of [A->B] Life by mewithoutYou, and I was very excited to finally play it.
I'd been keen to check them out more since hearing Torches Together but not had a chance. Their name came up again that summer in an entirely unrelated manner - I was on holiday with some friends and got bored of the book I was reading, so started reading the ones Nadine had brought with her - she was taking a course about time travel in literature, so had copies of Slaughterhouse Five and The Time Traveller's Wife. Slaughterhouse Five gripped me and [Spoiler alert] I was amazed to turn the page to see the words "Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt" in giant letters at a key point in the book (if you've not read it and ignored my warning, I'm sorry for spoiling that part for you). I can remember it vividly, sat on this pristine white-sand beach in Croatia reading about horrible details of WWII. I spent a lot of time on the rest of the trip thinking about that book and that phrase in particular. When I got back I googled it and saw that it was also the name of a song by mewithoutYou from their first album. I was even more keen to check them out to hear that song. Of the six cds I bought that day in Kelly's, this one was at the top of my listening pile.
The song itself is an anomaly on the album, it starts quietly with sung vocals and swiftly moves into a wall of noise with the song title signally the break. The vocals remain in the background with the rest of the band dominating the sound over the top, unlike anything else they've ever recorded. Initially I was a bit disappointed that a song with such a strong title would sound so different to what I was expecting given the other songs I'd heard, but now I love it for the oddity it is. The rest of the album provides countless examples of the brilliant shouty hardcore I'd come to expect from the song I'd heard beforehand. I’ve always enjoyed bands with unique takes on vocals, and was listening to a lot of post-hardcore and screamo bands (as much as I hate that term, it is appropriate), so was in the perfect place for mewithoutYou. Bullet to Binary was a perfect opener and Nice and Blue, Gentlemen and Silencer are incredible songs (the first of the three with the excellent line "I'm not the boy I once was, but I'm not the man that I'll be"). The Ghost panicked me at first with it's sung-vocals at the start - I was worried that the spoken-word style was a rare treat and actually they sung most of the songs, I was pleased to be proven wrong by the time the chorus hit.
Recently, the band have been touring playing this album and I was a bit gutted I didn't get to see them play it. As it was my entry point to the band, I'd have loved to have made it to one of the shows. I gradually bought all their other albums over the years, mostly on vinyl and had been thinking about completing the collection eventually. I was pleased to see that they reissued this one and picked it up along with the reissue of their debut EP I Never Said I was Brave (featuring far heavier versions of a couple of songs from here). I got screwed on customs fees by the post office, so they ended up costing me way more than I was expecting - it went from "on the pricey side of reasonable" to "expensive". I need to find a better way of getting records from the US. The colour of the vinyl looks absolutely lovely, which made up for the customs blow. As a nice bonus, the acoustic version of I Never Said I was Brave from the end of the cd is included (without the long, silent wait!).
Format: 12", picture sleeve, insert
Tracks: 13
Cost: £31.70 new
Bought: Band's webstore
When: 27/01/18
Colour: Half gold / half black
Etching: none
mp3s: Download code
