Album Review: NO MORE APOCALYPSE FATHER by We Are Winter's Blue and Radiant Children

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.

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Montreal’s Constellation record label deserves to be spoken of with the reverence given to the most significant indie labels of the past few decades. Their initial run in the late 1990s introduced the world to such unique entities as Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Fly Pan Am, Do Make Say Think, and a Silver Mt. Zion. But every label must endure a moment where the initial name-making bands and defining sounds move on or become predictable, where we learn if the label will survive in the long term and at what cost or compromise.

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