- Before you've heard a moment of their music, you know The Fun Years are two gloomy bastards. This is a duo, after all, who cheekily entitled its first two records Life-Sized Psychoses and Baby, It's Cold Inside; they call themselves The Fun Years while creating wintry, shoegazey music that drones and twitches and almost moans. The Fun Years—Ben Recht and Isaac Sparks—specialize in long-form ascendances of noise and carefully orchestrated chaos. Their dense, frosty soundscapes—built mainly of guitars and turntables—resemble the best material of artists like Tim Hecker, Ben Frost or the early work of Finland's Es. However, if it's music of affliction, then it's also kind of gorgeous.
But following those first two records for rising Boston/NYC experimental label Barge Recordings, The Fun Years enhanced their profile by contributing an exclusive cut to Kompakt's Pop Ambient compilation in 2009 and a cut on The Wire's The Tapper (not to mention Boomkat's championing of Baby, It's Cold Inside as their album of 2008). All of which leads to a noticeable increase in notoriety in time for the duo's third album for Barge, God Was Like, No.
Though still comprised of the duo's sample-based, symphonic dirges and leaden guitar work that owes as much to post-rock as it does to more traditional drone music, God illustrates a new sense of compositional structure and pacing to the duo's work. It's scabrous at times; it moves almost toward subtle violence, only to recede into passages of gentle shimmer that sound like a brawnier Stars of the Lid. The template, to be sure, hasn't changed, but God demonstrates a mastery of the form that should have listeners rearranging their best-of charts as the year draws to a close.
"Breech on a Bowstring" opens things with guitar plucking that slowly grows more urgent as a small static wave uncurls over its top—a moment of almost hymnal calm—before the "Division of Labor (TV Track)" gusts its noisy dissonance and clanging wind-like samples through its serene glow. Elsewhere, with its murky, crawling guitar work and chilly ambient hush, "Makes Sense to Me" almost sounds like the dour opener to a Mogwai record, while "Little Vapors" retreats into one of the album's more outwardly placid moments, just sampled piano, strings and crusts of ambient noise that begin to devour that quiet from the inside out and carries on into "And They Think My Name Is Dequan."
Out of that sandpapered buzz emerges the slow, almost waltzy drone of "Get Out of the Obese Crowd," one of the duo's harshest, noisiest creations to date. It's, in fact, this more aggressive and challenging timbre that dominates the album's second half, almost as though the album's disintegrating into subtle turmoil as the record wears itself out. Though it closes in a mood of relative restraint on the drifting synthesizer and turntable blur of "Precious Persecution Complex," God Was Like, No leaves its steady churn in the air for minutes after the room's gone quiet. It's almost a relief, this absence of the duo's increasingly intelligent grasp of tension. But then that quiet becomes its own noise and you welcome The Fun Years' beautiful mayhem back into the room.
Tracklist 01. Breech On the Bowstring
02. Division of Labor (TV Track)
03. Makes Sense to Me
04. Psychic Career
05. Little Vapors
06. And They Think My Name is Dequan
07. Get Out of the Obese Crowd
08. Precious Persecution Complex