Years – Years

Ohad Bechetrit, the musician behind The Years, plays a range of instruments with Canadian post-rockers Do Make Say Think, and is also a contributor to several other bands, most notably Broken Social Scene, but also Feist and The Hidden Cameras. The Years is his solo vehicle, and he has described it as a compendium of material that has accrued on his hard drive, in bits and pieces: partially realised snippets from previous projects, that never before made a final cut.This could, then, be seen in one of two ways. If you are a cup-half-empty type, then you will no doubt be imagining a long player cobbled together from offcuts, rejected tunes, failed or awkward material that wasn’t quite up to scratch for its original purpose. Those of a more positive or optimistic bent, however, may anticipate a quirky, uncategorisable, unusual but interesting set of tracks.Happily, in this case, those theoretical optimists would have been closer to the mark. This is a mainly instrumental collection, the only lyrics to be found featuring on the gently regretful ‘A Thousand Times A Day (Someone Is Flying)’ (“Some dreams fade, it’s true / Don’t be sad, some dreams say true”). Many of the tracks have a distinctly classical feel to them. The opener, ‘Kids Toy Love Affair’ sounds like a proper prelude, ushering in the tracks that follow in a beautiful string-based Rites of Spring type burst of optimism; and both ‘Are You Unloved’ and ‘44’ also benefit from orchestral arrangements, the latter ending the album in a beautiful, elegant and dignified manner. Elsewhere, Spanish, or modern classical, guitar is the dominant instrument. The guitar-work on ‘Don’t Let The Blind Go Deaf’ and ‘The Assassination of Dow Jones’ is fast, nimble and intricate, all repeated theme-and-variation motifs and squeaking fingers moving along the fretboard, in a pleasingly organic manner.As you might expect, there are also many tracks that are more easily pigeonholed as post-rock. Although occasionally resorting to some of the genre’s received ideas in a slightly predictable way (the main culprit being the nevertheless marvellously titled ‘Hey Cancer”¦ Fuck You!’), these by and large work well in combination with the other music on offer here. Indeed, ‘The Major Lift’ succeeds in combining nearly all the great elements dispersed elsewhere throughout the album: guitar, some dramatic and assertive brass, squelchy horns, flighty synths and melodious strings, all delivering up the most fully realised and memorable melody ”“ like the theme music for a really rather good film.As a whole, then, this is a collection of fascinating soundscapes, some of them not much more than snippets, some of them fully developed pieces. All of them, however, fully deserve their appearance here, and it is good indeed to know that this lovely, often inspirational music has been rescued from the ignominious fate of languishing forever on Bechetrit’s hard drive. 78%The Years on Myspace