by Dan Goldin (@post_trash_)
The music of WE ARE WINTER’S BLUE AND RADIANT CHILDREN feels a million miles wide, a vast expanse of arid landscapes with an endless horizon. Comprised of Efrim Manuel Menuck (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Thee Silver Mt. Zion), Mat Ball (Big|Brave), Jonathan Downs, and Patch One (both of Ada), the quartet’s collective oeuvre offers the project a sense of familiarity, but the band opt for open collaboration, the songs void of rigid structural definition or predictably. The band’s vision of gloom and unwieldy knack for sweeping momentum is their own. Due out on September 13th via Constellation Records (Matana Roberts, Ky, ALL HANDS_MAKE LIGHT), “NO MORE APOCALYPSE FATHER”, their six song debut LP, is a cavernous listen that draws upon an immersive foundation both brash and beautiful, a gorgeous embrace of catastrophe and calm reflection from the terror that pervades. Drawing upon an empathetic futility, the record’s cinematic resolve and the scorched earth impenetrability feel like a hallmark for WAWBARC, looking into the darkness in desperate scavange for the light.
While the album’s lead single and title track introduced the project with a noisy permanence, loud and droning meditative despair, and a wall of well crafted feedback to rattle our senses, their latest, “Uncloudy Days,” is the celestial spark in the shadows. On a song built around the destruction of our planet and the fury of natural disasters we’ve brought on, Menuck’s lyrics match dread with hope, his slow drawn vocals are decidedly detached but there’s a glimmer in his words, “there’s no good but the good we make ourselves / pinpricks of light thru the coming hells”. Searching for a shred of decency, it’s a song that’s otherwise buried in apocalyptic dread, but the composition is all whirring beauty and soft atmospheric bliss. The band’s lush pastoral guitars and synths create a soundscape of comfort, a lulling backbone for our memories of “joy and love and uncloudy days”.