The Fun Years - God Was Like, No

Our review
Customer reviews
Press release

4...according to our Clinton on Thu 11 Nov, 2010.

This is a nice surprise, a lovely drifting evocative record from a duo of guitar and turntable. Opener 'Breech on the Bowstring' is a lovely piece of ambient music, utilizing the guitar textures of Disco Inferno's 'DI Go Pop' experiments the track weathers as it's progressing gradually becoming immersed in sonic junk until it's unrecognizable from its earlier, prettier incarnation. The album continues in this vein - superb fizzing electronics mesh with shards of guitar and odd dislocated voice. The overall sonic feel is somewhere between Fennesz, Rothko, Belong and Strategy. The ghosts of My Bloody Valentine show up on several tracks in the heavily effected guitars. Another name that springs to mind is Arovane's superb 'Tides' record of a few years ago, this is more brittle, more metallic, less tuneful, but something in the flow of the thing has passed down through the years. The B side is more difficult, noisier and generally less appealing but by the final track the whole thing has dissipated into a hugely overdriven bulge of sound, as if there's a huge ball of fluff on the stylus.

Ben & Isaac began The Fun Years in 2004. In the intervening
years they have made some of the most memorable and
distinctive drone-pop albums to have come our way, evolving
from layered ambience to a hybrid sound that's impossible to
pigeonhole. Their setup of synths, turntables and guitar has lent
their music a quality that's halfway between the haunted loops
of Philip Jeck and the porous wall of sound so typical of My
Bloody Valentine, without really sounding like either. Their
drones are forever engaging and never quite follow the
trajectory you'd assume or expect, often bursting into violent
shards of sound. After 2008's critically acclaimed "Baby, It's
Cold Inside", several festival appearances and contributions to
Kompakt's Pop Ambient series, The Fun Years now return with
a new album, their finest to date.

Ben and Isaac haven't lived in the same city for several years,
so their recording sessions have necessarily become less
frequent and more intense. Splitting time between Ben's
makeshift recording studios and Isaac's bedroom tomb, The fun
years spent marathon recording sessions constructing, blurring
and honing their sound. These sessions, coupled with some
adventurous road tests performing the pieces in such uncharted
venues as an air traffic control tower and the guts of a Richard
Serra sculpture, imbues the album with a rich patina seldom
herd in new drone experiments.

This is most visibly displayed in the first half of the record, where
shorter songs fizz with melodic repetition and almost traditional
structures. The second half, by contrast, showcases a more
harsh and artificial tone, offsetting the serenity of the opening
with a more aggressive sound palette punctured with slow and
dense skittering decaying into sparse passages and layered
synth meditations, acting as a visceral yet cathartic fade-out for

this wonderful album.

RIYL: Ben Frost, Philip Jeck, Tim Hecker, Geoff Mullen,
Black To Comm, Gas, Stars Of The Lid, Mogwai.

Tracklisting:

breech on the bowstring
division of labor (tv track)
makes sense to me
psychic career
little vapors
and they think my name is dequan
get out of the obese crowd
precious persecution complex

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