"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," Efrim Manuel Menuck tells Daryl Worthington in the biographical material accompanying the first release from WE ARE WINTER'S BLUE AND RADIANT CHILDREN. "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."
The uncanny impression Menuck is responding to in that press quote swiftly summarizes the self-contradictory melting pot of experiences he unpacks across NO MORE APOCALYPSE FATHER, but it could just as easily apply to the frictionless experience of our daily idle pawing through the vertically scrolled landscapes of our devices. The successive, simultaneous stimulation of conflict, celebrities, commercial products and everything between is a tax of the postmodernist experience, but Menuck and WAWBARC have taken care across these six tracks to present all this cultural detritus in fundamental tension with itself.
Both lyrically and in terms of arrangement, NO MORE APOCALYPSE FATHER concerns a territory in constant flux, Menuck's trembling songs relaying one nightmare scenario after another (a neighbour accidentally killing pigeons after setting out rat poison, a baby with a fever, debt collectors, ecological collapse, the four horsemen of the apocalypse) and the sonic backdrop he, Mat Ball (BIG|BRAVE), and Ada's Jonathan Downs and Patch One conjure is similarly resistant to resolution. Guitars can range from radiant to scorched-earth over the course of a single track, synths plodding along like carnival organs here and reedy drones there, tape collages sputtering like beleaguered machines with anachronistic power sources.
On "Tremble Pour Light," Menuck intercuts between scenes of middle management water cooler talk, debt collection and a baby with a fever over a track that plods carefully in on a soft bass and bucolic tape loops of birdsong. For some listeners, these lyrics might strike as free association, but there's a coherent logic to be traced from one line to the next, and strong thematic ground to be established as Menuck makes an important connection between the privatized experiences of the domestic space and that of the globally conscious citizen. Bound to spark interest amongst fans of Menuck's involvement in Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra, who in 2014 released the similarly-titled Fuck Off Get Free We Pour Light on Everything where there too Menuck voiced concern over the world his child will inherit. Here, shifting from Silver Mt. Zion's expansive, orchestral rock palette to WAWBARC's avant-punk minimalism grants a formal license to present a cubist rendering of that anxiety, magnified by scenes of total ecological collapse and geopolitical violence. That comes to a head on the album's two-track finale suite concerning military use of white phosphorous munitions, a chemical weapon that can cause excruciating burns and lifelong suffering.
In the first part of the suite, Menuck recalls the 2002 incident in which Michael Jackson dangled his baby over a Berlin hotel balcony before turning his gaze to Israel's contemporary deployment of white phosphorous munitions on densely populated residential areas in Gaza and Lebanon. The Jackson incident is invoked here less with nostalgia than as a haunted acknowledgment of tabloid media's ability to whip public opinion on an individual over their (albeit extremely) poor judgment, while today's popular media still responds to one state's prolonged violence against civilians by inviting opposing viewpoints to debate it out live on the air.
While the white phosphorous suite is given nearly half the record's runtime and its central image foregrounds the album's finale, it is perhaps appropriately denied the sustained focus of even a single song — or even a title of its own: on the penultimate track, it is relegated to parentheses ("Dangling Blanket from a Balcony (White Phosphorous)"), while a separate parting note is prioritized before it at the album's end ("(Goodnight) White Phosphorous"). On that final track, a voice in the background wishes us goodnight, but in this context it feels darkly ironic. This is hardly the end and there's nothing routine or comforting about the situation, but 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.
Feeling out the friction and erecting tangible memory monuments in a thinking landscape that increasingly defers to digital recall, the group finds their footing in an unresolved future, churning present day tragedy into a speculative mythology that dares to hope while demanding action.
"We'll drown the four horsemen in the boiling sea," Menuck answers the innocent plea that prompted the album's title on "Uncloudy Days." "There's no good but the good we make ourselves."