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The Fun Years, "God Was Like, No"
The last album that Ben Recht and Isaac Sparks put out (Baby, It's Cold Inside) was named Boomkat's "Album of the Year" for 2008, so there was quite a bit of buzz and excitement surrounding the release of this follow-up.  Fortunately, God Was Like, No (the band's vinyl debut) does not disappoint and delivers yet another pleasant batch of warm and crackling soundscapes to enjoy.  Also, their streak of witty album titles continues unabated.
The Fun Years is kind of an odd project, the sort of thing that shouldn't nearly work as well as it does.  For one thing, although Recht and Sparks got their start in Cambridge, MA, they are now based on opposite ends of the country and collaborate mostly remotely.  Also, the duo are pretty disparate in their backgrounds, with Isaac being a former hip hop DJ and Ben being a computer science teacher with a PhD from MIT. Even the instrumentation itself is a bit peculiar, as The Fun Years’ combination of baritone guitar and turntable manages to hit an improbable common ground of blissful, droning ambience between the expected directions, never veering too far into either rock or cerebral abstraction.  Perhaps the key thing that draws these two together is a shared fascination with the unadulterated sound of their respective instruments. Lots of processing certainly occurs on God Was Like, No, but Recht's guitar still generally sounds exactly like a guitar (not laptopped into oblivion) and Sparks largely uses his turntable in a very "Phillip Jeck" way: as a means of sound creation rather than as a sampling device.
The album opens with its best song, as "Breech on the Bowstring" beautifully combines a cool jangly guitar loop with a melancholy chord progression of slow-motion swells.  However, each side of the album essentially feels like a lengthy single piece, as all the songs segue seamlessly from one to another and everything stays very firmly in the same vein.  So, in essence, "Breech" is merely an especially excellent beginning to a very good long-form piece.  The album’s other "song" highlight is "Makes Sense to Me," which gradually boils up into a masterfully restrained intensity as the guitars increase in both frenzy and volume. That is not to say that the rest of the songs are worse, it's just that those two pieces are the times when melody comes most strongly to the fore.
While it is definitely Recht's guitar work that gives the songs their structure, emotional shading, and recognizable melody, the less tangible contributions of Sparks are equally important.  Isaac's textural wizardy is the main thing that separates The Fun Years from the horde of other people making guitar-based ambient music these days, providing a grittiness and hissing pulse that takes the music to a deeper level. Also, the duo prove to be quite adept at turning the omnipresent vinyl crackle into an asset, using it as a fog for sounds to hide behind before subtly sneaking their way into the foreground.  As such, God Was Like, No only truly reaches its maximum potential when headphones or extreme volume are involved.  The balance between melody and manipulated static leans a bit too heavily towards the latter for most of these songs to make a substantial immediate impact, but there is quite a bit of compelling microcosmic activity to keep me interested once I've been lured in.  As a result, I think the duo's masterwork is probably still ahead of them, but this is quite a likable and ambitious effort nonetheless.
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