Fast Years

CMJ 2012 is winding down, and we had a great time checking things out! Although there were plenty of major showcases that featured big name talent and out-of-towners, CMJ tends to be dominated heavily by local NYC-area bands. Because, you know, there are a lot of them. We wanted to share with you a few New York favorites who made the CMJ rounds.

Fast Years is a band that we had the good fortune to catch several times during the festival. Delivering unabashedly poppy hooks over garage-y guitars, and topped off with a classic New York Punk Rock sneer, these guys are a lot of fun. Particularly their song “Young Heart”. It has one of those choruses that you could just sing along to over and over again, and fortunately the song delivers that too. “Fall(ing) apart” never sounded so damn good!

You can hear more of their album on their bandcamp page.
Check them out! - Ear Plugs Not Included

The Route One approach works – there may be merit to music being complex and multi-layered, but there are other times when nothing but the most straightforward material will do. It often has much more impact, too – just ask Fast Years [Twitter/Facebook]. To put it bluntly, the Brooklyn band don’t fuck about. They’ve only been on the scene for a short while after forming last year, but they’ve been making a name for themselves with some of the most thrillingly direct indie-pop that I’ve heard all year. Their six-song debut EP is wonderfully consistent, but it still only hints at what could still be to come.

It opens with a brace of familiar songs; we’ve featured Young Heart and Let Me Try on here before), but the older material, full of effervescent hooks, surf-pop infectiousness and 24-carat golden choruses, is refreshed by the new context into which it’s been placed. The lyrics are as easy to relate to as they’ve ever been (‘You’ve a got a young heart, you’re afraid to break it’), and each of these songs is part of a wider story. Impressively enough, it’s the newer songs that are even more worthy of note, proving that the quartet aren’t just a band that are set to burn bright and fade away – the fading away doesn’t even come into the equation.

The first of the new songs is introduced by a thudding bass drum, a chiming guitar line and some steady bass: it’s a song that is very easy to, well, fall for; it’s called Fall For Me and is, at the time of writing, my favourite song on the EP. It shows, more than any other song across Women‘s 16 minutes, what the band are truly acapable up. The bar’s set quite high by it, and even if the remaining three songs don’t quite match it, they still come quite close.

Like It Or Not comes equipped with an irresistible melody and a vocal line that easily gets into the listener’s head, while Stolen Love hints at the darker and bluesier side of the band’s output, combining a powerful riff with reflective lyrics to great effect. Happy Hour closes the EP with an extremely catchy vocal hook and and another impressive chorus. Melodically speaking, the EP is pretty much perfect from start to finish. Women may be rather straightforward, but sometimes the best things in life are the simplest, and this is very much the case with Fast Years.

Women is released next week.

- The Blue Walrus

Remember when we first introduced you to Brooklyn-based Fast Years a few weeks ago in Good Listener?

Well, these guys really are fast- because this indie rock outfit already has a new video for their so-catchy-it-hurts single “Young Heart.”

Watch the premiere above….and just in case you can’t get the song out of your head (which you won’t) download it free here! - Nylon Magazine

S’gotta be a quickie today ladies and gentledudes. The caffiene high and subsequent crash, needfully instigated by a Monday full of meetings and trapsings around the mean streets of West London, having only just subsided (we think) has only yeilded a steady addition to the workload that we’re currently dealing with, much like a dude in a stripey shirt spinning plates on sticks at a summer fair. Hence we are staying in and working our balls off tonight. Which is not really that different from any other night, but hey, at least we don’t gots to move much. Anyway, let’s do this – Fast Years are from Brooklyn (you should love them already purely on that basis, huh?), play guitars and radiate coolness in an outward direction from the moment the listener hits the play button; and on this basis we cannot help but feel this has been a studio project in the making for some time, but of course this is a complete guess. The music makes for a refreshing change of pace; with a production style along the lines of Japandroids meets Strokes meets The Vaccines – which we might broadly describe as a brilliant lo-fi sound – and a penmanship not too far removed from the likes of The Ramones and/or The Walkmen, the recent emegence of this sweet new four piece has not gone unnoticed in the band’s own hometown, at which they will find themselves showcasing alongside Howler and Neon Gold-darlings St. Lucia. No doubt they will be here, there and everything sooner rather than later, but with tunes like these we’re sure as shit not complaining about it. To add to the overall bodaciousness, Young Heart is available as a free download from Fast Years‘ bandcamp. We really couldn’t choose between that and Steal You Away, so we just went ahead and did a double whammy, right here right now. - Killing Moon Limited

Who: Liam, Micah, Bill, & Chris
What: “punk/garage/indie/surf”, kinda like Wavves, The Denzels
Where: Brooklyn + Facebook / Bandcamp / Amazon
When: An EP is coming spring 2012.
Why: Because slightly scuzzed garage rock love songs with mega-catchy choruses will never get old. I have no doubt I will be jamming to this one all the way to Summer when it will really start hitting its stride. Hopefully there will be much more Fast Years by then. - The Burning Ear

“Young Heart” comes from new Brooklyn collective Fast Years. The track goes near polar-throwback in it’s tendencies towards nostalgic Garage and Pop. Especially for those letting a renaissance of bands like The Vaccines still sink in. Fast Years will be opening for Howler in their hometown later this January. - Blah Blah Blah Science

Visit Fast Years on Bandcamp.

Catch Fast Years on 1/20 @ Brooklyn’s Cameo.

Like Fast Years on Facebook. - A Heart Is A Spade

Fast Years support Howler in Brooklyn next Friday at the Cameo Gallery, and while they're probably not quite ready to blow the Minneapolis band offstage quite yet, there's sufficient bark to their garage stomp to merit a listen.

Two songs are online so far, and not a whole lot else, but the best of them is 'Young Heart', which is stuffed full of minor arpeggios and a synth line that ever-so-faintly recalls 'Jerk It Out' by Swedish one-non-hit-wonders Caesars. - NME.com

Fast Years are a brand new punk and garage inspired act based out of NYC. Their debut EP is due out this spring. For fans of: The Ramones, The Stooges, NY Dolls. Visit Fast Years on Bandcamp. Catch Fast Years on 1/20 @ Brooklyn’s Cameo (opening for Howler). - Max's Kansas City