Rock Star Rule No. 1: When you’re performing onstage and someone in the crowd yells “We love you!” to you, you should shout “We love you, too” in return. It’s just polite.

Aaron Weiss, front man for the indie group mewithoutYou, must have been absent the day they taught that in Rock Star School. Instead of “We love you, too,” Weiss usually stops the show and says, “I’m sure you’re all really nice people, but we don’t know you, and so we can’t say that back to you.”

Talk about a buzz-kill.

“We’re just trying to respect the word ‘love,’ to give it some meaning,” says Aaron’s brother, mewithoutYou guitarist Michael Weiss. “If you go around saying ‘I love you’ to complete strangers, then it seems that ‘love’ doesn’t mean much, does it?

“People get it mixed up; we’re the band, not their friends. Even though they might know a lot about us, where we come from and all that, they don’t really know us.”

In 2001 Aaron Weiss, Michael Weiss and guitarist Christopher Kleinberg were all in a band called The Operation. mewithoutYou was formed as a side project when Aaron wanted to experiment with new sounds and styles. (The name reflects the members’ Christian beliefs and refers to the problems people get into when they try to deal with the world without the benefit of God’s guidance.) Part of Aaron Weiss’s experimentation had to do with his singing style. In fact, while he is the vocalist for the group, you can’t exactly call what he does singing. It’s a little closer to spoken art, stream of consciousness, experimental poetry. Very experimental. But, somehow, strangely musical.

And instead of the usual rock star stance, posing in whatever way best shows off his hair, the lanky, spring-jointed Aaron’s onstage performances are punctuated with spastic, off-beat jumping, flinging arms and awkward high kicks. (Aaron’s spastic dancing and barely coherent ramblings onstage fueled an Internet fan site rumor that he was autistic. They also helped the group win the mtvU Left-Field Woodie as Most Original Artist.)

“Yeah, he does move around a lot,” says Michael, without a hint of irony in his voice.

But what’s most experimental about mewithoutYou is the group’s song structure. As chief songwriter for the group, Aaron has abandoned anything recognizable: There’s no standard verse, chorus, verse, chorus. No hooks or catchy melodies. Aaron’s songs, like his performance, are decidedly free-form. And yet, again, strangely musical.

mewithoutYou is often called post-hard-core rock or Christian core. Michael Weiss says he’s not comfortable with either label.

“I wouldn’t call us hardcore. I did grow up listening to hardcore, and I played in some hard-core bands in college, and it’s a part of my past, but that’s not what we are.”

Michael also chafes at the Christian core tag. “We don’t sing Christian songs. They’re not inspirational, like [gospel] songs, but we do have our faith and beliefs and those show through, not only what we sing, but hopefully also how we conduct ourselves offstage. If people feel inspired by what we do, great. But it’s not us that inspired them.

“I realize a lot of people who care enough to describe us have used hard-core or whatever…but I don’t really agree. But then again, I don’t really care what people call us.” Michael’s tone is nonplussed, not dismissive or arrogant; he seems resigned to not having control over the thousands of fans or dozens of journalists that might discuss the band.

He brightens when asked about the group’s new CD, Brother Sister.

“There are lots of new things on this CD,” he says. “For one thing, we wanted to expand Aaron’s vocal contribution, how he delivers his lyrics. We wanted to boost his kind of singing, but we also wanted to explore more melody, especially for him.”

In fact, Aaron went through a series of singing lessons during the early stages of writing for Brother Sister. “He tried to learn more about how to use his voice,” says Michael.

“We also wanted to expand the kind of songs we wanted to write, in terms of how they came about, sort of open ourselves [to new ideas]. In the past we’ve focused a lot on bass lines or riffs, more intensive songwriting. This time we did a little bit more of ‘Hey, here’s a song, it has four chords. Now let’s concentrate more on the lyrics.’ So we made a conscious effort to go into some new [areas] for us.”

There will be a lineup change at this Houston mewithoutYou show — bassist Greg Jehanian broke his arm in a freak table saw vs. plywood accident (aren’t all table saw vs. plywood accidents freak accidents?) just before the group’s recent European tour. Former mewithoutYou bassist Daniel Pishock will be filling in here in Houston.

mewithoutYou performs Tuesday, February 27, at the Meridian, 1502 Chartres, 713-225-1717.

This article appears in Feb 22-28, 2007.