The Fun Years – Baby, It’s Cold Inside

Description

2025 Repress

Ben Recht and Isaac Sparks’ long running Fun Years project hit a highpoint with 2008’s genre-straddling Baby, It’s Cold Outside, a five-song set of long-form compositions that draws upon on post-rock, drone, ambient, and glitch without really satisfying any of those terms fully. On the occasion of its 2025 reissue, now on Keplar having first been released on the now-defunct Barge Recordings, it sounds remarkably of the moment. Genre agnosticism is the standard setting in the post-NTS world, which positions Baby, It’s Cold Outside as somewhat ahead of the curve, though at the time, in reality, it was probably mostly just a brilliantly executed continuation (and, to their credit, combination) of the approaches of the wide constellation of acts labeled post-rock and their adjacent relations – there’s certainly some of the Chicago School in here (Warp-era Tortoise and Gastr del Sol), but also Germany too: Jan Jelinek, Oval, GAS and such like, a play of decayed clicks and cuts, meandering bass and guitar, and layer upon layer of ascending ambient drift. Hugely immersive stuff that reveals the human in the machine, a rare achievement with music of this kind and one that continues to elevate Baby, It’s Cold Outside some 15 years on.