On that note, this list wraps up with another post-hardcore concept album that sounds like virtually no other band in the world. mewithoutYou started out as a band clearly taking cues from Fugazi and At the Drive-In on their early EPs and 2002 debut album
[A→B] Life, but by their 2004 sophomore album
Catch for Us the Foxes, they perfected an art rock/post-hardcore blend that could sound like
OK Computer as much as it could sound like
Relationship of Command. The band's unique guitar patterns -- which could range from atmospheric post-rock to hard-hitting but atypical riffage -- sounded like no other band on their own, and then once Aaron Weiss' distinctive spoken/shouted vocals came in, there was a 0% chance you'd ever mistake mewithoutYou for someone else.
Catch For Us The Foxes is a near-perfect album. Its 2006 followup
Brother, Sister uses mostly the same formula, and it's even better. More so than
CFUTF,
Brother, Sister is a start-to-finish concept album in the tradition of albums like
Sgt. Pepper's. It starts and ends with the same lyric, it has a recurring song that shows up in three different forms throughout the LP ("Yellow Spider," "Orange Spider," and "Brown Spider"), songs flow right into each other, and there's no better way to hear these songs than in the order mewithoutYou sequenced them.
Brother, Sister has some baroque pop instrumentation in the form of harp, horns, and melodica, but what makes it so unique is it really is still largely a post-hardcore album. Heavy guitars and raucous screams still drive the bulk of the album, and sometimes -- as on the devastating album closer
"In A Sweater Poorly Knit" -- they use guitars to mimic baroque pop arrangements. (They also have guest vocals on two songs by Jeremy Enigk, who deserves a Grammy for his stunning performances on this LP.) It makes sense that the list ends here, because after
Brother, Sister hit, it felt like post-hardcore's wings had been spread as far as they could go. (Even mewithoutYou themselves ditched the genre on their next couple albums.) The genre needed to go away for a little while, reset, and come back in a new exciting form, which it did (and which mewithoutYou
also contributed to). Now, post-hardcore is going in directions that we probably couldn't have even imagined in 2006, but still,
Brother, Sister remains an album that sounds like the future every time you listen to it.