Description:

WE ARE WINTERS BLUE AND RADIANT CHILDREN (WAWBARC) is the new quartet of Mat Ball (Big Brave), Efrim Manuel Menuck (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Thee Silver Mt. Zion), and Jonathan Downs and Patch One (both Ada). On NO MORE APOCALYPSE FATHER they present six modal lullabies drenched in seared distortion, slathered across striding electronic pulses. Ball and Menuck began creating music in and for the bleakest moments of Montral winters: Were honoring that idea of winter, when you come inside and your house is warm, a place that only exists because of how cold it is outside, says Menuck. They later recruited Downs and Patch to flesh out their initial ideas. Menuck met them in 2015 when recording Adas final self-titled album at Montrals Hotel2Tango, the same studio where they combined to make this record. NO MORE APOCALYPSE FATHER is an album about witnessing bleakness from a place of safety. Carrying newfound descriptive depth, thanks to the quartets open-ended songs freeing him from writing in meter, Menuck likens his lyrics to photorealism. On opener Rats and Roses he sings of an unnamed city struck by an unknown cataclysm, but the details are local: specifically, his neighbors inadvertently poisoning birds when tackling a rat infestation. Its backed by blown out synths and guitars reaching a soaring crescendo. Seeing things from a distance and not being able to intervene happens a lot on the record, Menuck explains. If youre a feeling and thinking person, thats just part of the human condition. We watch horror unfolding from afar, unable to do anything concrete to change it. A powerless witness, able to describe but not intervene. Dangling Blanket From A Balcony (White Phosphorous) references Michael Jackson holding his child over a hotel balcony in 2002the bizarre media spectacle still lodged in Menucks psyche. This and the albums closing track also elegize white phosphorous, a technology of war designed to light up battlefields but capable of inflicting horrific burns on those it touches. Illumination and horror in one, here underpinning scenes picturesque and terrifying. The last song (Goodnight) White Phosphorous is deliberately like a lullaby, says Menuck. Written from the viewpoint of watching white phosphorous falling outside your window. Scorched and tarnished and laden with harrowing imagery, NO MORE APOCALYPSE FATHER is also a record bathed in light: the bewilderment of hopeful spirits witnessing despair, watching a blizzard of distress unfold outside from a place of relative shelter and comfort. You could call that emotional ambivalence, maybe numbness. But those words are too passive for the weight of conflicted feeling resonating through the album. I never know how I feel on an overcast day when the sun is still bright despite the grayness and the light is very flat. The colours become more saturated, and you see a single flower, say a morning glory, whose colour is so vibrant beneath the gray, I dont know if thats a lovely sensation or a terrible sensation. Its both, says Menuck.