Wednesday, April 04, 2007
the fun years
dave nardone of brooklyn's barge recordings recently sent me a couple of discs for review, here's the first of the pair.
life-sized psychoses
[2007, barge]
it seems like the massachusetts-based fun years (isaac sparks and ben recht) have aimed to release a pleasant album... and didn't get any more ambitious beyond that. for their part, they've definitely succeeded. this duo have put together forty-nine minutes of vanilla ambiance. held together by warm vinyl crackling, life-sized psychoses drifts in and out of your consciousness with soothing textural layering (emanating from a turntable) and repetitious guitar playing, which isn't such a bad thing. i'm sure that the fun years could achieve a rather sizable fan-base with the kind of music that they're making, but this album's just a bit too innocuous for me. used cd bins the world over are clamoring for inoffensive background music to stock their shelves with, and that's the fate that seems likely to befall this. personally, i need that je ne sais quoi that makes me want to listen to an album more than once. make it uglier, catchier, prettier... something. not doing anything necessarily wrong isn't always better than not doing anything right. barring the opening track, there's a considerable lack of dynamics to the music. if there was more going on that i could get into, obviously that wouldn't be as much of a concern, but ten minutes of the same thing that you could either take or leave, over and over, can get old pretty quick.
in the hands (and ears) of someone else, i'm certain that tfy could get a more positive critique, but this just doesn't move me. there's plenty of opportunities on this album where ben and isaac have a solid foundation, such as on softy as stilts, which is one of the better pieces of music on here. yet, when they've put themselves in a position to make something worthwhile, they squander it by insisting on doing the same thing incessantly, instead of building on it. there's a few different routes that this track could've gone: either they could've delayed and reverbed the hell out of this and at least made a great piece of space rock that you could bliss out to, or they could've capitalized on the sparsity of the guitar and had it evolve into something a bit more epic and crescendoing. they already gave a bit of a nod to mogwai on the nice and meandering in case you had any doubts..., why not dip their brush into the post-rock palette a bit more?
D >> 2
the next disc from barge is a compilation that i'll get to tomorrow. based on the names i see on it as well as the positive press it's gotten, should be good.
life-sized psychoses
[2007, barge]
it seems like the massachusetts-based fun years (isaac sparks and ben recht) have aimed to release a pleasant album... and didn't get any more ambitious beyond that. for their part, they've definitely succeeded. this duo have put together forty-nine minutes of vanilla ambiance. held together by warm vinyl crackling, life-sized psychoses drifts in and out of your consciousness with soothing textural layering (emanating from a turntable) and repetitious guitar playing, which isn't such a bad thing. i'm sure that the fun years could achieve a rather sizable fan-base with the kind of music that they're making, but this album's just a bit too innocuous for me. used cd bins the world over are clamoring for inoffensive background music to stock their shelves with, and that's the fate that seems likely to befall this. personally, i need that je ne sais quoi that makes me want to listen to an album more than once. make it uglier, catchier, prettier... something. not doing anything necessarily wrong isn't always better than not doing anything right. barring the opening track, there's a considerable lack of dynamics to the music. if there was more going on that i could get into, obviously that wouldn't be as much of a concern, but ten minutes of the same thing that you could either take or leave, over and over, can get old pretty quick.
in the hands (and ears) of someone else, i'm certain that tfy could get a more positive critique, but this just doesn't move me. there's plenty of opportunities on this album where ben and isaac have a solid foundation, such as on softy as stilts, which is one of the better pieces of music on here. yet, when they've put themselves in a position to make something worthwhile, they squander it by insisting on doing the same thing incessantly, instead of building on it. there's a few different routes that this track could've gone: either they could've delayed and reverbed the hell out of this and at least made a great piece of space rock that you could bliss out to, or they could've capitalized on the sparsity of the guitar and had it evolve into something a bit more epic and crescendoing. they already gave a bit of a nod to mogwai on the nice and meandering in case you had any doubts..., why not dip their brush into the post-rock palette a bit more?
D >> 2
the next disc from barge is a compilation that i'll get to tomorrow. based on the names i see on it as well as the positive press it's gotten, should be good.
:: posted by avant gardening, 7:35 PM