In the great scheme of music history, it’s near impossible to talk about La Dispute without mentioning mewithoutYou. And I’m as guilty as anyone in that regard—mewithoutYou has been my favorite band for around thirteen years, and they were the first band to mix hardcore conventions and spoken-word (shouted-word?) vocals that La Dispute also uses.

It was this very relationship that kept me from La Dispute. I dismissed them as derivative—runners-up that sought to usurp of the throne mewithoutYou abdicated when they had their folky phase.

But then, I actually started listening to La Dispute. And brother, they don’t deserve my dismissal.

Sure, the basic building blocks are the same—melodic hardcore instrumentation accompanied by shouted vocals. But a comparison of the two discographies will prove that there is plenty acreage to plow there without running into eachother.

While Jordan Dreyer has the same sophisticated bookishness as Aaron Weiss, it’s aimed in a different direction. If Aaron is a poet, Jordan is a journalist. His writing is concrete and narrative-based, filled with all of the inconsequential details that stick out for no reason—the feeling of a key sliding past the tumblers before opening the door, the way the grass grows through the concrete in front of an abandoned church, the shape of a skyline in the rearview mirror.

These details punctuate the loss and tragedy that informs Wildlife, itself a collection of conceptual short stories that follow strangers: speculative explorations into the lives of others.

As a result, Wildlife is a dense record, and the one (of the two La Dispute records I own) that I return to least often. It’s three minutes short of a full hour, filled with some of the heaviest narratives to put to tape. A families wrestles with loving their schizophrenic son. A detached narrator wrestles with the emptiness of his one-night stands. A child is murdered in a drive-by, sending his shooter into an impassioned plea, wrestling with the death he deserves and the morality of his suicide. Listening to the record often feels like digesting an entire collection of Hemingway stories at once.

Naturally, there are no choruses here. Often, there aren’t even rhymes. Jordan passionately spills his narratives while the band matches pace.

And you know what, nobody ever talks about La Dispute the band, overshadowed as they are by the fire of their frontman. But they deserve just as much as the acclaim. As a musician myself, I can tell you that it isn’t always easy to capture the mood of a lyric in music—or vice versa. Yet the instrumentalists keep in lockstep with Jordan, even as his stories weave up and down back alley streets, through crime scenes, and hotel hallways. Through the entire record, there isn’t a single moment where they break that connection.

And while this record doesn’t get very much play on my turntable, it’s nevertheless a masterpiece. A significant work from a band at the top of their form. It just doesn’t lend itself much to casual listening.