the fun years

god was like, no (Vinyl Edition)

*Long-awaited new album from this amazing project, sounding somewhere between Ben Frost, Tim Hecker, Philip Jeck and Fennesz.* The Fun Years are responsible for one of our favourite records of the last few years, the magical 'Baby, It's Cold Inside'. This is the much anticipated follow-up, dropping on a one-time vinyl pressing of 500 copies and delivering their first new material since an inclusion on Kompakt's Pop Ambient series. Arguably, it's their finest work, evolving the grainy loops and organically constructed drones into a living, breathing mass of intangible yet deeply affecting emotions set somewhere between the majestic blur of Philip Jeck's classical loops and Mogwai's widescreen post-rock, without really sounding like either. After a string of intense recording sessions and road testing the material in odd locations like an air traffic control tower and the guts of a Richard Serra sculpture, 'God was like, No' was finalised, resulting in eight tracks which bend light and sound with a gorgeously tactile and almost kinaesthetic quality. This is best heard on the first side of shorter drone-pop experiments, five tracks which glow and fizz with a matt luminescence, constantly realigning your depth perception as serene layers of synth drone hover in and out of focus, fluttering and disintegrating around blissed, infinite guitar loops not dissimilar to Fennesz's work on 'Endless Summer'. Once we've snapped out of the trance, the other side introduces an altered palette of shapes with a more tensile, frictional relationship. From the subtly dense crescendo of crackle and foreboding gongs in 'And They Think My Name Is Dequan', 'Get Out Of The Obese Crowd' sinks fathoms deep into gruffly distorted textures and stays there until the tidal waves of cathartic ambient noise in 'Precious Persecution Complex' gradually subside. And breathe. If you love feeling shored up and dazed at the end of an album, this one is an absolute must.