ALL HANDS_MAKE LIGHT - "Darling the Dawn"
Constellation Records
Released April 21st, 2023
On their debut full length LP “Darling the Dawn”, ALL HANDS_MAKE LIGHT have aimed for nothing short of the universe. Following an ethereal self-titled cassette, longtime friends and collaborators Ariel Engle (Broken Social Scene, Patrick Watson) and Efrim Manuel Menuck (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Silver Mt. Zion) have here set their formidable talents to the task of rendering all the beauty and suffering of the dawn, of the rising and falling of the sun. Synthesizers bloom and decay, voices chant and summon, and the songs bend and flood with gravity and grace.
Emerging from the mist of vaporous tones that begin “A Sparrows’ Lift”, Engle’s silvery voice shivers and glides through tides of sound that rise and fall with oceanic grandeur. The mundane is made elemental and divine on the ten minute opus “We Live On A Fucking Planet And Baby That’s The Sun,” which climbs from a low pulse into an ecstasy of sound, featuring radiant contributions of layered violin shimmers by Jessica Moss and torrential drumming by Liam O’Neill (SUUNS). On its creation, Engle writes of a transcendent experience of morning: “One morning I woke at dawn, sat up like a bolt, and heard myself say those words. [It] is about the uncanniness of living on a sphere. The smallness of us in contrast to the size and motion of planets and the comfort of the eternal return of dawn and sun after the night.”
Riding the burning edge of dystopia, the songs travel through the bleak and uncanny to arrive at the joyful and rapturous; not only a feat of rigorously honed songcraft but evidence, too, of profoundly poetic minds. Of the album’s inception, Menuck has said that it was “like tossing seeds into an alley, hoping the blooms would rise and exhale and endure.” The result is a monumental album possessed by a raw, exultant feeling: the sublime feeling of waking up the morning after the end of the world, surrounded by everyone you’ve ever loved. It is music for the spirit, music that will reach inside of you and rearrange something inexpressible in your very center. As Menuck writes:
“these times are in-between times. the old things are sinking with their hands around our throat. there is a dawn coming, and a terrible reckoning too. there’ll be even more beauty there, during the unravelling, and then even more after the dark times are through.
hold on
and hang onto what you love.
the dawn comes for us all.”
- Harman Burns
