The Fun Years - Heroes of the Second Story Walk Up

Pitchfork 81

Think of the Fun Years as Ratatat, only inverted. Like the feline-sampling Brooklyn bros, the bicoastal duo emerged a little more than a decade ago, offering the allure of an oddball instrumental configuration—a baritone guitarist with a sharp melodic sensibility and a crucial producer with a knack for situating that sound in some deeply absorbing context. But where Ratatat favored samples and beats and athletic themes, the Fun Years instead sprawled, sculpting soundtracks for the gloaming and for daybreak, or music to be played between Ratatat’s up-all-night anthems. Isaac Sparks used turntables to create haunted landscapes populated by soft drones, disembodied voices, and textural phantoms, overlaid by Ben Recht’s circular guitar lines, which always suggested some deep, unspoken longing. The Fun Years were a salve for when the lights weren’t quite out, but the party was inarguably over.

The engrossing new Heroes of the Second Story Walk-Up at long last perfects that premise and promise. It is the most fully formed and expressive of the Fun Years’ ten albums to date and an immersive emotional Rorschach test, where each moment scans differently depending on what you bring to it. A forty-five-minute suite of seven interwoven pieces, Walk-Up moves like a long piano sonata, where each movement seems to comment on the same subject but never in quite the same way. The approach enables an emotional breadth and accessibility that can be rare in these arcane corners of instrumental music, making Walk-Up the kind of record you want to crawl into and inhabit for a spell.

During the second movement, for instance, the guitars chime as though marching toward some grand post-rock climax. Just beneath, though, there’s a teeming bed of strained static and hiss, lurking in wait. The signals grow and eventually overtake those guitars, crawling across them and forcing them into submission, like ivy spreading over stone ruins. By the time Recht’s guitar creeps through the electronics for the third movement, they’re anxious and desperate, with tense minor notes reflecting prior failures. But they begin to harmonize with Sparks’ choir of electronics, shaping a two-player symphony that somehow sounds hellish and heavenly at once. And are those deep bass drum clips pounding beneath part five—aptly dubbed “Deepest Xylophone”—the sound of approaching thunder or a calming pulse? Walk-Up’s ambiguity is its most rarified accomplishment, an instrument that lets you take your own temperature just by listening.

The Fun Years have been working at this admixture for years, devoted to the perfection of a singular sound and form. They’re clear descendants of Touch Records and producer-composers such as guitarist Christian Fennesz and turntablist Philip Jeck, for whom timbre has sometimes seemed like the compositional pinnacle itself. But they’ve learned over time to give these ethereal sounds structure and motion, so that listening to a series of drones and spirals feels more active than merely drifting. On Walk-Up, they unlock what has made Tim Hecker astonishingly popular in recent years—textural phosphorescence that’s occasionally overpowering and always open to interpretation.

As the needle or the cursor nears the end of Walk-Up, you may start to anticipate some rhapsodic finish, some radiant climax that pulls all the emotions of the first forty minutes into one honed point. That expectation is understandable, a vestige of the quintessential post-rock and soundtrack scripting that also inform the Fun Years. But Recht and Sparks avoid the temptation of tidiness, choosing instead to stay true to script and let these feelings fade into the middle distance as one. Recht militantly strums one sharp chord again and again, as Sparks’ circuits run their course and empty into a series of fantastic glissandi that stretch, in the end, like an auditory ellipsis. It is a pragmatic conclusion, an honest admission that all these conflicting urges and experiences are only mercury, anyway. There is no triumph, no transcendence, no abject despair—or, depending on your momentary outlook, a little bit of all of it.