Reviews – Make a Rising
Author: Jennifer Kelly
Source: Popmatters.com Feb 2006
“This is a beautiful, complicated mess of an album, and it gets more interesting every time you put it on.”
Reviews – Make a Rising
Author:
Source: Washington Post
“The group does work more in movements than songs, and it takes a stab at just about every genre. Classical, cabaret, hardcore, prog, folk — it’s all there.”
Reviews – Make A Rising
Author: Christian Carey
Source:Copper Press Fall 2005
Cooing vocals are set against bumptious piano licks, discordant electronics, and animated drumming in the psych-calliope ambiance … Make a Rising is never so obsessed with eccentricity that they can’t make memorable music along the way.
Reviews – Make A Rising
Author: Hank Shteamer
Source: Time Out: New York , Sept 2005
“Philly’s Make a Rising can genre-splice with the best of ’em; Rip Through the Hawk Black Night traverses melancholy Beach Boys harmonies, chilly music concrète and clattery prog rock. But that’s not what makes the band special: For all their schizo tendencies, MAR’s songs maintain beautiful, compelling narrative threads that transcend any particular musical style.”
Reviews – Make A Rising
Author: Michael A. Parker
Source: D.M.G. Newsletter May 2005
I’m completely in love with this album. I keep it by my stereo at all times. I could easily write a few pages about this astonishingly original experimental chamber rock pop naive song prog cinema music, but space is limited here, so let’s do the quick-and-dirty name game. My research reveals the following major influences on these young multi-media art eccentrics from Philadelphia: The Beach Boys, The Ruins, Van Dyke Parks, Henry Cow, Cheer Accident (especially “Enduring the American Dream”), 10CC (getting into this band was the major musical turning point in life for one member), Gentle Giant, Van Morrison. “Impossible bedfellows,” you say? That’s why I said “astonishingly original”!! Here’s my best formula after months of analysis: Gastr Del Sol + ELO + Robert Wyatt’s “Rock Bottom”, all noted especially for their extremely unconventional song structure. In fact, this album is like a suite of about 20 different moods and styles in a non-repeating sequence. Though often absent for long stretches, vocals are critical; they’re boyish, charming, and earnest, sometimes accompanied by banjo or piano and sometimes decked out in fabulous harmony parts. Instrumentation in rough order of significance: keyboards, electric guitar, drumkit, bass guitar, violin, banjo, trumpet, saxophone, studio trickery.
They rock out avant-prog style in short bursts here and there, and I want to make special mention of one instrumental track that’s an absolutely orgasmic marriage of RIO and math rock, starting out with something that could almost be from Fred Frith’s “Gravity” and then moving into slashing, dramatic stop-start attacks and cross-rhythms. But that’s a bit of an exception for the album, which is pretty dreamy and drifty overall. Make A Rising is the best thing to happen to experimental pop music since Animal Collective started writing actual songs, and I’d call it the best ambitious song album since Mr. Bungle’s “California”, compared to which it’s homey, introspective, whimsical, and delicate, and without the virtuosity, bombast, quotations, or big-budget sheen, but with the same level of epic, creative, bizarre songwriting.
Reviews – Make A Rising
Author: babysue
Source: lmnop.com
Link to this article
Very weird, very artsy stuff. You have to appreciate a band making music that is certain to alienate almost everyone. Philadelphia’s Make A Rising is a band on a peculiar mission. Rather than sounding like anything or anyone familiar, these folks write and record confusing and difficult compositions that recall some of the stranger British art rock bands from the 1970s. The result is a confusing hodge podge of ideas. Rip Through the Hawk Black Night sounds something like a modern Athens, Georgia band if they were combining modern classical with indie pop. The first track (“Look At My Hawk”) alone contains so many ideas and song fragments that most listeners are likely to be overwhelmed. But is this great music…or is it just strange and offbeat? The truth is that…this album is a little of both. By allowing themselves so much room to experiment, these folks often go off the deep end. But this is ultimately what makes this such a unique listening experience. Crazy tracks include “Plastic Giant,” “Expired Planet,” and “Partial Thoughts.” Truly odd. (Rating: 5)
Review – Make A Rising
Author: Chris Dahlen
Source: PitchforkMedia October 25, 2005
Link to this review
As you stumble through repeated listens to this disc and your brain makes sense of the chaotic song fragments, you might find a thread in the album by hearing it as a story– a children’s adventure, say, the kind that has maximum momentum with minimum exposition. The guitar and violin that echo Robert Fripp and David Cross sparring in mid-’70s King Crimson also sounds like you’re fending off 10 pirates at a crowded bar and slicing out their tongues without knocking over a single beer. The hollow rattle of percussion stands for chains rattling hopelessly at the bottom of a prison– and the arbitrarily long drones sound like making an escape out a 10th-story window and praying for an awning below.
Or maybe that’s all wrong. For their debut LP, Make a Rising, a cult fave around Philadelphia that deserve wider attention, may not have planned out a narrative so much as a series of incidents and accidents. The arrangements and production hew close to ’70s art rock and Henry Cow, but the transitions are all post-Zorn– and the listeners who are used to translating musical cues and moods into a cogent whole will find themselves ready to deal with this kind of music after, say, Cerberus Shoal’s last few records, or even Fiery Furnaces’ Blueberry Boat. We’re trained to go with the flow– wherever it leads.
Make a Rising recorded it at their work space, giving it a strange but old atmosphere like a decommissioned black box theater: The upright piano sounds dusty, and the musicians rattle around in the wings and jump in whenever it’s their turn. The first eight cuts run together in what may or may not be a suite, which is largely instrumental, outside of the male and female vocals that whiz in and out like tissue-paper ghosts on a string. Those songs are followed by the “Expired Planet”, a far more conventional and summery pop song (aside from the male singer, who sounds like he’s trying to stand up in a canoe), and the album wraps up with the surprisingly sweet ukulele and accordion of “Partial Thoughts”.
Without sounding sloppy, the performance is ramshackle, with plenty of room sound to fade into and acoustic blind spots to jump out of, making your first listen unpredictable: breaks and free passages run longer than you expect, and the melodic, driving sections that follow leave you wary of what’s coming next. Needless to say, that’s what makes it so engaging. Some modern ears may be spoiled by bands like– to take yet another not-really-similar example– Animal Collective, who always wind up safely back at the campfire: Rip Through the Hawk Black Night ends sweetly but it doesn’t clear things up. But that has its own rewards.
Magnet features Brian McTear, Shot x Shot, Make A Rising
The new Magnet Magazine features a section about bands in our fair, shared city of Philadelphia. One article, 15 in Philly: Philly Future, features the top up-and-coming bands in Philly and features our own Shot x Shot and Make Rising, as well as Tickley Feather, The Swimmers, and Hoots & Hellmouth.
There’s also a great aricle on Brian McTear of Bitter Bitter Weeks and his work at Miner Street Recordings.
Reviews – MAR
Author: #9
Source: Dream Magazine, Summer 2008
Manic cartoon pop ala XTC in a funhouse hall of mirrors shape-shifting themselves into a psychedelic infinity of possible permutations, then slow disintegrating ice crystal snowflakes by piano and birdcall like high woozy Smile outtakes. Almost a Randy Newman melody married to a harmonized heroic prog-rock march that ultimately blooms into a holy lost Flaming Lips prayer. Elsewhere they bring to mind Akron/Family, Charles Ives, the Beach Boys, Mr. Bungle, King Crimson, Moondog, Spirit, and others. Quite sublime and certainly one of the best albums of 2008.