March 4-10, 2004

music

On This Rock

LICKING THE LABEL: "If you say you're in a Christian punk band," says singer Aaron Weiss (left). "It almost sounds like an oxymoron."

Local punks mewithoutYou play with a different kind of passion.

by John Vettese

Aaron Weiss has two major passions in life: punk rock and Jesus Christ.

Pragmatically speaking, you’d think the one would cancel out the other. Christianity and the punk community are stalwart groups by and large, usually occupying opposite ends of the ideological spectrum with no easy bridge in between. Admittedly, Weiss is still trying to figure out what role the Bible should play in his life as he fronts mewithoutYou, a post-hardcore quintet that is simultaneously one of the area’s loudest and most overlooked bands.

Nevertheless, he sees hope in his dilemma.

"If you say you're in a Christian punk band, it almost sounds like an oxymoron," he muses. "Christianity has been married for so long to the power and the politics of the world, which is exactly what most of these kids are rebelling against. It's just like saying you're in a Wall Street punk band. But I can't help but think it's the Establishment and not the teachings of Jesus that they are opposed to."

It's a Thursday afternoon and the band is in Missouri enjoying a day off from tour and recharged by their first night's rest in a comfortable house as opposed to a vibrating bus. Weiss' voice is still hoarse from last night's gig in Lawrence, Kan., as he talks about how he discovered hardcore, how he discovered God, and how the two have managed to gel.

A native of Upper Darby, Weiss and his brother Michael (who plays guitar in MWY) got involved in the local punk scene through the usual venues -- a Minor Threat CD, a West Philly warehouse show, a camaraderie with outcasts wanting to fit in somewhere. But as his teenage years wore on, Weiss found that things weren't as nonconformist as they'd once seemed, and he became disillusioned.

"You can't just act however you want. You still have to look a certain part and listen to certain music and think a certain thing about the government," he says. "At least for the kids at school, the jocks or whoever, they made no bones about who they were. If anything, [punk] is even worse 'cause it's all in the name of being against that."

Still, Weiss found a place to belong and his musical tastes evolved, stretching beyond area bands like Mouthpiece and toward national acts At The Drive-In and Jawbox, both big influences on his band's sound today. His first stint as a performer came in the late '90s as a drummer in The Operation with his brother and Chris Kleinberg on guitars. The dynamic shifted around in 2000 when scene buddies Dan Pishock and Rich Mazzotta joined on bass and drums; Weiss stepped to the microphone to vent his frustrations in a spoken-word howl, and the rechristened mewithoutYou were picked up by Seattle's Tooth And Nail Records a year later.

At the same time, he struggled with the idea of faith and his purpose in the world. He was not raised in an explicitly religious setting; his mother is Muslim, his father Jewish and his uncle Buddhist. "I had a lot of influences, a lot to think about," he says.

A troubled teenhood led Weiss to something of a spiritual awakening when he was 17, and he started attending church with a friend. Enchanted by the Bible's lessons of love and compassion toward humanity, he soon became frustrated by the misapplication of those lessons in modern society: the disparity he saw in his own city between the wealthy and the poor, "faith-based" government leaders thriving on intolerance and war, even the dubious multimillion-dollar industry surrounding Christian music.

Quickly, the appeal of Bible study and Sunday services wore off.

"It was the same nonsense I ran into anywhere," he says. "This is just like the punk shows: the same politics, same games and same rubbish. This isn't different and, again, it seems to be worse because it's in the name of something higher."

He stopped attending church for a while, but eventually put his misgivings with institutional religion aside and pressed on with his adopted faith out of a desire to find a greater meaning and explanation of human existence than "just being an accident." Why does he exist on this planet? Who or what brought him here and what is expected of him?

At 25, those are still questions Weiss ponders. After all, he says, if the teachings of Jesus were followed in the purest sense, he and his bandmates wouldn't be spending the day off of tour idly relaxing at a friend's house. "He's this guy who was homeless, who gave up everything He had for wandering around, healing people and feeding people."

They wouldn't even be touring musicians with guitars, amps and a record contract, and the mere notion that mewithoutYou could be viewed by some as capitalizing on religion makes him uneasy.

"It's all sort of drenched in compromise," he says. "Here we are driving around in relative luxury. We have a van, we have instruments, meanwhile there's 30,000 kids each day that die of starvation and disease."

As much as he has to say about it all, such weighty issues figure comparatively little in the music of mewithoutYou. The band's 2002 debut [A-->B] Life (pronounced "A to B Life") is steeped in a torrent of swirling guitars, thumping drums and the occasional piano line, squalling around Weiss' stream-of-consciousness lyrics, mostly vignettes of relationships and interpersonal tension; only "Nice and Blue" and "The Cure for Pain" deal overtly with Christianity ("The cure for pain is in the pain and it's there that you'll find me/ until again I forget and again he reminds me/ "Hear my voice in your head and think of me kindly.'").

Weiss says he goes for a separation of church and lyrics first because he writes from his own day-to-day experience, and second because when there is an underlying message, he wants it to be tangible to his listeners.

"I won't pretend I don't have an agenda, because I do, but it's not to get people to just agree with these teachings they've already heard," he says. "I want people who don't believe or who have rejected God to consider that maybe there is some truth in this. That's why there's no sense in regurgitating religious dogma, since nobody can relate to that."

Certainly this is not the first band to mix punk and religion -- New York hardcore outfit Shelter preached Hare Krishna in the early 1990s and Tooth And Nail was initially founded to give a helping hand to acts like MXPX who were turned away from other punk labels due to their faith -- but mewithoutYou are one of the most open when it comes to their beliefs, and that openness has led to a fair share of ridicule.

"Yeah, we've had people who have been pretty adamant about saying religion has no place in punk rock," Weiss says. "Mocking us as we play, or maybe mocking Jesus and the crucifixion. You get the sense that there's a liberal attitude in punk of whatever you believe is fine, with the exception of Christianity."

It's a sticky situation, but Weiss is believes that the standard by which most honest people and punks end up rejecting Christianity ultimately is the ideal that Christ taught -- laying down one's life for one's friends, loving one's neighbor as oneself, loving one's enemies.

"I think there's a clash between anybody with any shred of sanity and the teachings of the church," he says. "But these kids who are against Christianity aren't really against Christ, they just have a hard time separating the two. And why wouldn't they?"

mewithoutYou plays the Tooth and Nail Tour with Further Seems Forever, Anberlin, Watashi Wa and Emery, Sat., March 6, 9 p.m., $12, Theatre of Living Arts, 334 South St., 215-922-1011.