Make A Rising
rip Through The Hawk Black Night
High Two Recordings
Maybe I’m just becoming cynical in my old age but in many ways it seems like it’s really hard to find bands that make honest music. Now “honest” may be a somewhat loaded term but really, how many bands can you think of that play music that stands up on its own, unshaped by fashion, irony, pretension, self-importance or any other of a myriad of conscious or unconscious poses? In my experience, most of the music out there—whether phenomenally executed or mind-numbingly mediocre—takes most of its cues from what’s going on around it, what’s popular within a particular circle, what’s considered funny, satirical, etc and often spends loads of time and energy creating artifices designed to impress, depress, anger, enthuse, or just generally manipulate its given audience. The band essentially creates a mask of its own desired self-image and subsequently uses this mask to obscure the human truth of their creative project. They try to hide all their weaknesses, to overstate their strengths, or generally make themselves into something more than a bunch of kids playing with expression and trying to eke out some meaning in the process.
In these terms of what it means to be honest, I’d say that there’s no band that comes close to the evocative honesty of Philadelphia’s Make A Rising. Yes, they possess some sense of the theatrical. Yes, they’re prone to literally hiding their faces behind a small array of handcrafted animal masks. But fundamentally, these elements of pomp and pageantry are about as diversionary as the worn cover of an old book of fairy tales—it’s simply a kind of depiction or celebration of something pure and simple within, an invitation to the imagination, or a small loosening of the confines of an otherwise magicless day-to-day life. If anything it is this last thing—magic, or the widespread lack of it—that seems to motivate this band and is essentially what I believe their honesty is all about. When it comes down it, they’re basically just a few dreamers trying to create dreams in more real terms than is usually possible; man-children who have discovered some fantastic playground hidden amongst the mundane hostilities of West Philadelphia.
As canned as it may sound to describe a band’s work as embodying the innocence of imagination, there’s really no better description that I could use to describe rip Through The Hawk Black Night, Make A Rising’s recent release on the local jazz/experimental label High Two. Spread out over 45 minutes and ten tracks, rip Through The Hawk Black Night essentially reinvents music, mashing pop harmonies, gentle lullabies, experimental noise, rock and chamber music sensibilities into cohesive pieces that are as much driven by the conventions of elementary school play-acting as they are by their forward-thinking orchestrations. Precariously balancing an unflinching sense of whimsy with lush, painstakingly composed musical passages, the sonic terrain of …Hawk Black Night can quickly alternate between sweetly sung narratives with silly lines like “he fell asleep / beneath a wooly beast…” to the devastating enunciations of musical themes that are as massive as anything produced by the major post-rock acts of the turn of the century.
While much of Make A Rising’s lyrical and conceptual content is marked by an apparent bent towards escapism and the fantastic, at the core of all of their lyrical flights of fancy is a deep understanding of the fundamental realities of human existence: our desires to be better than we are, our fears of loneliness, and our simple want to be loved and to love. For every wildly grandiose wash of piano, strings, guitar, bass, or drums, etc, for every mind-blowing instrumental rise and fall or savage foray into the musical unknown, the songs on …Hawk Black Night inevitably return back to their original place of calm intimacy, leaving you—in the end—with the simple human presence of the band itself, with all of their imperfections and frailties open and exposed. Listening to some of Make A Rising’s plainly-phrased lyrical gems, such as their one-time choral chant “I am scared of being alone” and the album’s closing words “I love yoooooooou,” it immediately becomes clear what their costumes and their minor theatrics are all about. These displays are not to shield themselves from our eyes but merely to expose a part of themselves that might otherwise remain concealed, a more innocent self that endurs despite our pretentensions about growing old and more serious—a self that still believes in limitless imagination and the plain truth of feelings.
It goes without saying that any band capable of conjuring such critically human stuff as Make A Rising regularly does on …Hawk Black Night is not only a great band, but perhaps one of the finest around today. There’s no doubt that this record is the one of the most impressive releases to come out in 2005, and it is an absolute testament to the kind of music that can be made when people put aside convention and image, and just play out of their truest nature. Make A Rising is a singularly rare and beautiful band, and rip Through The Hawk Black Night is a singularly rare and beautiful album. If you take any stock in the opinions of this webzine, then please, do not let either this band or this album pass you by.
