The Fun Years Life-sized Psychoses
Title: The Fun Years - Life-sized Psychoses
Label: Barge Recordings
Cataloge No: BRG002
Type: Album
Reviewer: Rich
Date: 8, April, 2007
Now this is something different, turntable ambiance and baritone guitar drone with no drummers and no singers with botoxed lips of doom or high fashion celebrity links, actually I don't know that any of those celebrity skins would even know what drone music could be but anyway, it sort of set the scene which is generally the thing i find hardest when writing reviews, and this album is by no means an easy one to write about.
Anyway, this duo from NYC have released their debut album proper as one of the first releases on the pretty cool Barge Recordings label which first came to light with their brilliant Innature compilation. The first thing that pretty much hits is how dark and cold this album is yet it still retains the warmth of the baritone guitar and the underlying human presence. Each of the five tracks build up layers of thick yet not too sickly drones and soundscapes. Each track flows along slowly with the ever changing yet ultra minimal pops and crackle of turntable loops and samples. Never speeding up to more than a snails pace yet nowhere near as slow as other drone experimental guitarists Earth.
Four of the five tracks here range well over the 8 minute mark which gives time for the music to expand and slowly fill the available space without feeling rushed, and each is different enough to be a separate song yet as close to each other to be listened to as a whole piece of work. Near the end of the album things get a little heavier, Softy As Stilts leans more to into the darkness with low end fuzzed out guitar licks, yet it never borders on the doom side of the genre for there is lightness in the cold darkness. At no point does any of this become depressing, although at times unsettling it's low-fi soundscapes have made this a brilliantly captivating and intriguing piece
which seems to reveal something new with each listen. Certainly a band and label to keep an eye on.
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