As it comes time for Advent to roll around again, in the middle of creeping fascism, genocide, wars, and rumors of wars, it is time for me–an Episcopal seminarian who truly can’t shut up about this band– to return, once again, to the ambiguously-genred-band mewithoutYou’s most underappreciated album, Pale Horses, which is the ultimate Advent album. 

When I got hooked on this album, I was in a sad, existential mood, in the middle of midwest winter, surrounded by death and suffering and grief. I listened to the sixth track, Dorothy, more that month than can be good for anyone. I was consumed by a sense of grief and hopelessness that I was struggling to fight, and ran to this song, with its sad resounding cries of “Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani, to give voice to my angst. Yet, in the repetition of the cry of dereliction, my angst began to fade into a small and steady sense of hope. 

While listening to Dorothy, I found myself identifying with the feeling of being forsaken by God, finding an odd comfort in settling into the melancholy. Singing the song to myself, it was easy to feel as though I was the originator of these words; that the cry of Christ on the cross was my cry, and mine alone. But, hearing the song over and over, hearing the plaintive words sung by a voice that was not alone, I started to lose my sense of loneliness. Hearing someone else pick up the words that were on my heart reminded me, in a way that I could not shake, that the words I heard ringing inside were the words that Christ had known in a way more true than I could conceptualize. 

The devil, casually mentioned in the song as the one who suggests contemplation of the cry, was the one who tempted me to think that this cry of forsakenness was nothing more than my own voice, without the solidarity of God incarnate crying out for me. But as I listened more and more, I found the heaviness and weight of my grief beginning to be lifted – not removed, but carried by one stronger than myself. 

If you’re familiar with the lectionary, the book of Revelation is a familiar source of selections for Advent texts. Even for non-lectionary users, it makes a certain type of intuitive sense. The apocalyptic imagery anticipating Christ’s birth is echoed in the depictions of the second coming, the making of all things new, and the end of times. Christ’s first coming was in a lowly manger, wrapped in swaddling clothes, and heralded by angels to poor shepherds. His final coming will be as the Alpha and the Omega, arrayed in white robes, and heralded by the four horsemen of the apocalypse. The last, of course, rides a pale horse, whose name is Death. 

Accordingly, “Pale Horses,” the album’s opener, starts with an almost word-for word narration of the sixth chapter of Revelation. That track is followed by the explicitly political “Watermelon Ascot.” Chock full of references to esoteric political events, board games, organic soap brands, and… basically everything else imaginable, the song suddenly slows down in tempo when it brings up the explicitly apocalyptic imagery of the burst of the red dwarf star, destroying

everything that humans have worked for. Finishing with the haunting, old-timey lyrics of “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,” the song asks us where we turn to, who we turn to, in the face of a world that’s careening towards destruction. In the same way that Advent calls us to face the terror of the world around us, seeking the truth of Christ in the midst of swarms of competing messages and chaos, we hear in “Watermelon Ascot” the grounding and calling back to the gospel, to leaning on the arms of God. 

Skipping towards the latter half of the album, “Magic Lantern Days” is as close to an Advent hymn as you can get when dealing with nuclear war. The lyric “unto the earth a bomb is born” harkens to the scriptural “unto us a child is born,” as the themes of impending destruction of (1)1 life make the earnest plea at the end of the song— “guide us to where our infant redeemer is laid” —ring out with deeper clarity. 

The last song on the album, “Rainbow Signs” closes Pale Horses by going back to direct quotations from the book of Revelation.. But while this song starts with explicit end times imagery, invoking the unrolling of scrolls and the sending forth of the armies of God, it closes by returning to the personal, immediate context; reflecting on the lead singer, Aaron’s, relationship with his father, taking us back to our own pre-eschatological existences. 

The countless references, explicit or not, to the book of Revelation within Pale Horses make clear the apocalyptic linkage. The constant theme of end times imagery, of technological creep, and nuclear fears ties the album tightly to its scriptural source material. There are even references that are less about Revelation and more about the nativity itself, tying in the Gospels. But none of that alone makes it an Advent album. 

What makes it an Advent album is the wavering, uncertain, frail hope of salvation that threads itself through the whole album. The teasing of threads of hope, of personal stories, of biblical complexity and fear overcome by love, all hint towards God’s coming, God’s grace appearing in human flesh. What points towards Advent is the darkness of the album; the fear and pain and grief that surround the brief bursts of hope, of light. It’s that in the music, we don’t wonder if the apocalypse is coming, we wonder how God will come to us in it. It’s the knowledge of the certainty of death, and the hope in the chance of life. The same wavering, risky, irrational salvation that we look for over the course of Advent; salvation that comes in the oddest form: a weak, tiny baby. 

Pale Horses is an Advent album because it sits with us in our grief and brokenness, while still crying out for something. Someone. What makes the album gorgeous and true isn’t the absolute sadness that I thought was sustaining me through the darkest days of a miserable winter. The greatest beauty of the album is the unsteady but persistent cry of hope. Hope that there is someone out there. Hope that endures even through the last days.

1. If I had a nickel for every Christian song explicitly about nuclear warfare, I’d have two nickels (this and the Louvin Brothers’ “Great Atomic Power.”) Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird it’s happened twice.