The Editor’s pick of videos by some awfully talented people.
Foxy Parable
The Philadelphia-based band mewithoutYou has been around for a decade, anchored by brothers Aaron and Michael Weiss. The Weiss boys grew up listening to alt-punk thrashings of Jawbox and its cousin band Burning Airlines, and made their first splash as frontmen for a band called The Operation. In classic punk-band style, mewithoutYou is a spin-off project that has shuffled through a series of bandmates and musical trends in its ten years of existence.
The band’s bio currently describes its style as, “a blend of experimental rock structures, punky energy, spoken-word melodies, and Judeo-Christian content” – an elixir that caught the attention of punk/hardcore, Christian-crossover label Tooth and Nail Records.
Their latest offering largely sets down the electric guitars for a more acoustic sound, while still clinging to the band’s raw-voiced punk sensibilities. The 2009 album, “It’s All Crazy! It’s All False! It’s All a Dream! It’s Alright,” borrows heavily from the teaching of Sufism, a brand of (mostly) Muslim mysticism that focuses on purification of the inner being and (in some schools) the playing out of that process in practical life. The band has been known for playing out its inner life in unusual ways. They travel on a bus powered by vegetable oil gathered from restaurant excess, and at one time were avid ‘freegans,’ gathering food and other usable items from dumpsters of large corporations in order not to waste.
This music video for their song “The Fox, The Crow, and The Cookie” captures the current spirit of mewithoutYou, playing out the song’s melodic moralism in beautifully executed puppetry and set design — that also shows all its strings and wires. The final product smacks of the untrained enthusiasm of guitar-shredding post-teens, but is infused with genuine talent and tempered by professional experience and craft. A lot like the band itself.
Anyway, we found it engaging. Hope you do, too.
