For an explicitly Christian record label, Tooth & Nail was home to several ambiguously religious post-hardcore bands. Underoath and Anberlin often framed their devotionals in the more general language of emotional or physical apocalypse. Philadelphia five-piece mewithoutYou were signed to Tooth & Nail in the mid-2000s, but their spiritual qualities are introspective and intersectional; lyricist Aaron Weiss draws together Christian, Jewish, and Muslim traditions, forming an intricate, collagist cosmology through which he relates to God.

Weiss' lyrics on Pale Horses, mewithoutYou's first album for punk label Run for Cover, detail his struggles with the densities of language and the inward mutations of faith, which writer John Jeremiah Sullivan once characterized as "a logical door which locks behind you." "I've just been thinking and reading more about language and words and how hard their meanings are to pin down—even simple words, let alone complex, lofty ones that I've long since been fascinated with," Weiss said in an interview with Myspace posted a few weeks ago. "So I sort of questioned my ability to communicate anything worthwhile. If I'm not sure that I'm going to say something that's going to help anybody or say anything that's true, then I might as well make it sound pretty."

The imagery on Pale Horses offers generous doses of apocalypse, drawing largely from Revelation 6, in which seven seals are broken and generate the end of the world; in one verse, Death materializes on a pale horse. In the song "Red Cow", "green figs fall from the Nebraska sky"; in the Book of Revelation, this is an analogy for stars unscrewing from the depths of space. Pale Horses also absorbs several modernist texts; in the same Myspace interview Weiss mentions the influence of James Joyce, which contributes a kind of unconscious and shattering rhythm to his writing. "Here again the chords clash," Weiss sings at the start of "Watermelon Ascot", reshaping a line in Ezra Pound's "Sestina: Altaforte", and through the rest of the verse ("Again the half-past/ Carrie Nation cut glass/ Prohibition children of the have caste") his internal and associative rhyming begins to simulate the inversions and precise orbits of Pound's poetry. On previous albums Weiss tended to communicate through analogy and parable; on Pale Horses his words and references collapse on each other like glass in a mosaic, only obtaining sense and meaning after they've fallen together.

Musically, Pale Horses functions as a kind of career summary, compressing their musical digressions into a coherent whole. It's also their first album recorded by Will Yip, who this year recorded dreamier, gauzier records by otherwise formally punk bands Title Fight and Turnover. To Pale Horses he mainly contributes a concussive drum sound reminiscent of the snares on Nirvana's In Utero, where individual hits resemble the burst of a paper bag. The songs are motivated more by groove than any individual riff or melody, anchored by bass and drums around which guitars pulse in uneasy constellations. Under these conditions, songs tend to expand and change shape, often ending in places more aggressive and primal from which they began.

The final track on Pale Horses, "Rainbow Signs", begins gently and glacially, Weiss barely whispering over soft bruises of guitar. It ends with a guitar riff that metaphorically and physically peels away the earth, lifting out of the track like a cathedral through a desert floor. "The sky, I'd been told/ Will roll up like a scroll," Weiss screams, and you could almost mistake his voice for a bloom of static. "The sun will turn black as a dead raven's back/ But there's nowhere to hide from the judge's face." But after the world recedes in a dense cloud of scripture, Weiss ends the record in a very personal and opaque place, with a dream of him and his deceased father, consciously merged and inwardly telling an intimate, unexplained joke about the Bible. It's one of the few completely successful and uncompromised methods of communication between people: An inside joke.