Scott Morrow is ALARM’s music editor. Patrick Hajduch is a very important lawyer. Each week they debate the merits of a different album.
The Fun Years: God Was Like, No (Barge, 11/16/10)
The Fun Years: “Breech on the Bowstring”
[audio:https://alarm-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/The_Fun_Years_Breech_on_the_Bowstring.mp3|titles=The Fun Years: “Breech on the Bowstring”]Hajduch: The Fun Years is among a noticeable cadre of artists pushing icy, shoegaze-tinged ambient music these days, but the duo lacks the name recognition of Tim Hecker or even Ben Frost. Hopefully, its 2010 release, God Was Like, No, changes that.
The group is comprised of Ben Recht on baritone guitar and Isaac Sparks on turntable, but this album suggests that there are a lot of delay and fuzz pedals in that signal chain. Fittingly, the album opens with swirling guitar notes that gradually build into a sustained howl before suddenly exiting stage left, leaving a repeated crackle and simple guitar phrase in their wake.
Though it’s more than 40 minutes long and holds eight tracks, God Was Like, No ignores its purported divisions to form a cohesive suite, with each track blending into the next. All maintain a similar minor-key melody while shifting timbres in and out; bit-crunched, buzzy guitar, bowed cymbal, and repeated snippets of manipulated vocals all appear and disappear. The overall effect is of one long track; it’s very satisfying.
Morrow: Albums that can stand as one long piece are things of beauty when they’re expertly done. But for me, ambient and drone artists are at a disadvantage here because so many of them already draw songs into six- or seven-minute pieces that blend together. And though this “album arc” was done intentionally on God Was Like, No — no track begins with a discernible change in audio — it doesn’t have that feel of an album that builds and releases.
It’s cohesive, but it doesn’t have enough variety for me. By the time that everything fades to the bowed cymbal in “And They Think My Name is Dequan,” I feel that it’s a long-overdue respite.
Hajduch: That moment in “And They Think My Name is Dequan” is where the album truly hits its stride. The cymbals and static begin to take prominence, forming a stilted, lurching, near-4/4 backbone that shores up an ominous one-note drone. As the background fuzz fades out of focus, a series of out-of-time loops of vinyl crackle across the stereo field. Then these too succumb to silence, leaving only the sparse beat of the cymbal.
“Get Out of the Obese Crowd” then picks up immediately, with a strummed riff modulating between straightforward and blown-out seemingly at whim. It’s an 8-minute-long stunner of a track and serves as this brilliant album’s focal point.
Morrow: Indeed, “Get Out of the Obese Crowd” is one of the album’s best, and I didn’t think that its longest song would be one of my favorites. It has a lot of great sounds and textures, but it’s also one of the album’s more dynamic tracks.
On a side note, props are deserved for another solid album title, which has followed song or album names such as “Fucking Milwaukee’s Been Hesher Forever,” “Auto Show Day of the Dead,” and That’s What I Call Droning, Volume 4.
Hajduch: And the previous album was called Baby, It’s Cold Inside, which inspires the perfect combination of mirth and sad, lonely dread. Hopefully, God Was Like, No gets The Fun Years the attention that it deserves.