WE ARE WINTER’S BLUE AND RADIANT CHILDREN
"NO MORE APOCALYPSE FATHER"

"While 'NO MORE APOCALYPSE FATHER'” is another avenue for Menuck to channel his polemic rage, alongside Ball, Downs and One, he finds fitting allies, who together create the desolate atmospheres of noise that rest heavy on the heart." - Sun-13 Top 50 Albums of 2024 #25 

"Channeling their individual talents for explorations of the sublime, they make effects-heavy and expansive dronescapes that upset 'post-rock' assumptions while tilting obliquely at Alice Coltrane’s organ/synth works, Swans, Suicide and Scott Walker’s avant-gardism." - UNCUT

"'NO MORE APOCALYPSE FATHER' covers new ground for all involved. It’s music that feels like a recurring dream with subtle variations. Alternative universes within alternative universes. The ground hog day enveloped by those, indeed, winter blues." - Sun-13

"WE ARE WINTER’S BLUE AND RADIANT CHILDREN have conjured a haunting and concise impression of what so much of our anxious reality looks like now. We almost know too much, the entirety of a world’s awfulness poured out via a media, social media, and internet machine into a constant deluge that overwhelms the human mind. What’s most absorbing is that 'NO MORE APOCALYPSE FATHER' can tackle such weighty themes and still be a beautiful listen from start to finish." - PopMatters

 "'Goodnight (white Phosphorous)' is an ominous Labradford lullaby, while the title track opens with a series of rhythmic detonations. 'There's no good but the good we make ourselves,' sings Menuck on the Bad Seeds-adjacent meditation 'Uncloudy Days', but it's small comfort in this ominous landscape." - MOJO

 "WAWBARC have created a moment in space to unpack the ugliness of these juxtapositions without artificial restrictions or formal considerations, and to develop images into objects to be reckoned with, making jagged and three-dimensional the crises and contradictions we've been conditioned to smooth over." - Exclaim!

 "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. (...) 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 predictability." - Post Trash

“There’s a grandeur to the whole thing, awe-inspiring both in spite and because of its destructive nature.” - Silent Radio

"Soundscapes that are both bleak and harrowing while also warm and inviting.” - Metal Trenches 8.7/10

"An album that feels very analogue, fuzzy, warm, rough-around-the-edges, and has the earnest, honest quality that has almost become a trademark of Hotel2Tango. It’s hard to imagine this sort of music being created anywhere else… a real treat." - Boolin Tunes 7/10 

"A study in media massaged contradictions and an attempt to re-sensitize in a vertically scrolled cultural landscape, the title track from their upcoming 'NO MORE APOCALYPSE FATHER' sends a volley of industrial blasts over the fray, then a guitar lights the sky on fire before Menuck's trembling voice feels out the friction." - Exclaim!

"Their debut LP is a cavernous listen, a gorgeous embrace of catastrophe and calm reflection. Drawing upon an empathetic futility, the record’s cinematic resolve and scorched earth impenetrability feel like a hallmark for WAWBARC, looking into the darkness in desperate scavenge for the light. The band’s vision of gloom and unwieldy knack for sweeping momentum is their own." - Post Trash

"It's electric, alt rock on an epic scale, a dark matters drum beat, the mountainous face of mass guitars, the vaulted synth strings and barely constrained feedback chaos. This is the sound of doubt and anguish given voice through a pleading vocal which bites without any unnecessary gothic melodrama. Signs are on every level WAWBARC’s first soundscape will be essential." - Backseat Mafia

WE ARE WINTER’S 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 (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 Montréal winters: “We’re 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 Ada’s final self-titled album at Montréal’s 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 quartet’s 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. It’s 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 you’re a feeling and thinking person, that’s 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 2002—the bizarre media spectacle still lodged in Menuck’s psyche. This and the album’s 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 don’t know if that’s a lovely sensation or a terrible sensation. It’s both,” says Menuck.

Daryl Worthington, April 2024

PACKAGING NOTES

CREDITS

Patch One: Lapsteel, Bass, Ghost Drums, Tape Collage, Voice
Jonathan Downs: Electric Guitar, Synth, Voice
Mathieu Ball: Electric Guitar
Efrim Manuel Menuck: Matriarch, Guitar, Voice

Recorded at Thee Might Hotel2Tango and flooded basement August 12-24 2023.

Mixed by Seth Manchester at Machines With Magnets.
Mastered by Heba Kadry.

Front cover art by Christopher Rivera.
Inner sleeve art by Patch One.