A little while ago, I started listening to the Rolling Stone list of the 500 greatest albums of all time and I started writing a little bit about each album to memorialize it. After a while, I shifted to writing about some of my personal favorite albums. I found that I had a lot to say about this one in particular, probably because it’s one of my favorite albums, it’s dense with references to poetry and scripture, and I was coping with the band calling it quits in 2022. Regardless, this post has roughly everything I have to say about the album Brother, Sister by mewithoutYou. 

The album, whose name is a reference to “The Canticle of the Sun” by St. Francis of Assisi, follows the lead singer, Aaron Weiss, through a spiritual transformation. This is evidenced by the first line of the album, “I do not exist”, which is the same as the last line of the album. However, in the beginning it’s a statement that is insisted but not true, and at the end is genuine. The album also features a trio of songs about the progression of a spider withering away. The spider is a symbol of the singer’s separate self slowly dying as the album goes along. 

I also went through each song and wrote about what is going on musically. It’s hard to write about music in words and doubly hard to do so without the pretentiousness of a Pitchfork review, but I did my best. Their lyrics always got a lot of attention, and rightfully so, but I thought only talking about the lyrics would be a disservice to the album as a whole.

Here are links to each of the songs on the album:

1. “Messes of Men”
2. “The Dryness and the Rain”
3. “Wolf Am I! (and Shadow)”
4. “Yellow Spider”
5. “A Glass Can Only Spill What It Contains”
6. “Nice and Blue (Pt. 2)”
7. “The Sun and the Moon”
8. “Orange Spider”
9. “C-Minor”
10. “In a Market Dimly Lit”
11. “O, Porcupine” 
12. “Brownish Spider” 
13. “In a Sweater Poorly Knit”

Alternatively, here is the whole thing in a PDF.