God Was Like, No

VINYL FORMAT. Limited one-time only vinyl pressing of 500 copies for the world, with unique artwork and labels for the LP version! Ben and 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 harsher and more 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.