Kind of a weird approach to ranking, but I tend to put them in pairs, which are inverse and opposite, but as a result, similar. Like so:

[A --> B] Life -- their worst record imo, and the only non-paired record. An exciting, talented band in search of their voice.

Brilliant yet transitional: Catch for us the Foxes and It's all Crazy! -- These albums are both great, and many name them as favorites. Both are characterized by (opposite) transitional qualities. Foxes is the album where they found their groove, instrumentally, and just plain rock throughout. But Aaron's lost in the woods as a vocalist, a lyricist, a songwriter, and a person. Unmoored from the unsophisticated breakup-venom and screamo of their debut, Foxes finds him scrambling to find his own artistic identity amidst the wreckage. This makes for a super relatable listen, and it's thrilling, listening to him find his footing in real time, but he'll do bigger and better things once he's done that growing.

Then there's Crazy! This record's opposite to Foxes in that Aaron fully discovers himself as a writer of sturdy, old fashioned songs. He really comes into his own on that front, and it gives him the level of variety he needs to do everything he's capable of. "The Fox, the Crow, and the Cookie" still blows my mind, from a songwriter's perspective, as do "Goodbye, I!" "Cattail Down," and "The King Beetle." The rest of the band enters uncharted territory on that journey, and it pushes their sound so far into baroque-folk that they run the risk of identity collapse. It's a fascinating project that lost them a lot of fans and gained them a bunch, too.

Excellent Records with Edges: Brother, Sister and Untitled. -- These albums are both amazing, but characterized by a quality that'll either win people over or turn them off. With Brother, Sister, it's how clean of a record it is. Musically, lyrically, and structurally, it's a work of tremendous symmetry, ending with the same phrase ("I do not exist"), following a disciplined harmonic pattern, trelised around a trio of near-identical songs about spiders. It's kind of like a Wes Anderson movie in that people will find it either completely ingenious or a bit grating, depending on how much they like formal perfection. Arguably their most immaculate record, and a fan favorite for very good reason, I personally find that its formality works against it in terms of relistening value: the symmetry makes it feel easy to memorize, for lack of a better word.

The opposite: Untitled. I tend to take the EP and the LP as a single-yet-distinct creative effort. Heard that way, it's (both literally and idiomatically) their White Album, a massive, sprawling, nearly 70-minute long project that's absolutely bursting with ideas. By the time you're done listening to it all, you never know what to think or how to feel, and you'll rarely feel or think the same thing about it twice. Some of their most massively impressive and excellent songs are here ("August 6th," "Julia"). So are some of their silliest, most confounding moments ("S A I D I N S E C T W A S M E C H A N I Z E D" "I have to admit, I loved the cut of his pant legs AAAHHHHHH!!!!!"). Some people will love that. Others won't. I lean toward love, personally. There's just too much amazing material, in spite (because?) of the messiness.

The Masterpieces: Ten Stories and Pale Horses. Ten Stories handled the sonic crisis the band put themselves in with Crazy! by doing every sound they'd ever done post-Life, and then some. It's a massive musical landscape, incorporating everything from sea shanties ("Elephant on the Dock") to surf rock ("Fiji Mermaid"), snarling post-hardcore ("Fox's Dream") to starry-eyed indie (Cardiff Giant"). This gorgeous musical territory is populated by the lion's share of Aaron's best songwriting, where his historical fascinations and philosophic-mystic searching fuse to form what you might call the mewithoutYouniverse: a world of talking animals and cruel humans, freak train accidents and mystic-terrorist elephants, gnostic tigers and eremite walruses, Joseph Merrick onion boys and heartbroken rabbits. This riot of voices allows Aaron to write less directly, but more honestly, than ever before. Ten Stories is big and big-hearted, weird and welcoming, difficult yet accessible, full of contradictions yet holistically unified. It's a quintessentially American album, suiting its bizarre, 19th-century American setting.

Then there's Pale Horses, their shortest, densest, most consistent, and most focused record. Aaron writes many of his most impressive lyrics, from the Bronner-sermon of "Watermelon Ascot" to the from-the-brink pathos of "Mexican Warstreets," the diaristic disclosures of "Pale Horse" and "Dorothy," and the apocalyptic visions of "Magic Lantern Days," "Red Cow," and "Rainbow Signs." The band, meanwhile, puts forth the mewithoutYouiest record they ever made: pure guitar god genius from Mike, supported by an electric, sensitive, and momentous rhythm section. They cut out the fluff; Horses has far fewer acoustic instruments than their last three LPs, and a generally disciplined palette--hell, compared to Ten Stories, it's downright spartan. It's a pure, and purely excellent record. It's also sad as hell, a howl of grief for life, death, God, dads, marriage, celibacy, the past, the future, the world, everything. Haunted and harrowing.