No Age’s Nouns creates new noise-rock genre

No Age toys with sound effects and experimental lyrics.

By Kelsey Whipple
May 6, 2008

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Courtesy of Sub Pop Records

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L.A. indie-fuzz duo No Age has made its living on stubbornly disassembling trademark noise-rock and doggedly recreating it, the result’s an almost supernatural take on a decidedly unnatural racket.

Case in point: Nouns, a sophomore album that sounds like what Casper would have recorded had he ditched the “friendly” and discovered effects pedals. If traditional indie-rock politesse seems to have been written out of the band’s script, it’s been replaced with guts.

And if what guitarist Randy Randall (no kidding) and drummer/vocalist Dean Spunt do sounds easy, it probably isn’t. The duo’s music is best described by taking pleasant adjectives and diluting them ­— surprising becomes startling, captivating becomes disorienting — but the results, if monochromatic, are about as far from unpleasant as L.A. is from the U.K.

An abject disinterest in modern pop-rock layered over sheer distortion, has given No Age all the mangled energy of a new kind of American noise, rounded out with the sort of smoke-stained, alcohol-soaked tropes that denote true California dreaming. Not good — great.

Because No Age is ultimately an experiment in sound, lyrics often rank penultimate on its list of priorities. “Brain Burner”’s exquisitely unfeeling lines are a spectacular exception: “I couldn’t make it cold, so that’s what I become/Do it every day for school and see the damage done.” And while “Burner” hones in on drug addiction, “Cappo” takes its cue from the duo’s Californian predecessors. As it punches out lyrics like, “Don’t you want to cry?/If I were you, I’d cry/Force it out,” Spunt’s voice is more Beach Boys than My Bloody Valentine.

Nouns lasts an epic 30 minutes, with the majority of the 12 tracks clocking in substantially below the three-minute mark. Though the songs are hardly polished, there’s a glossier shine here than on the even lower-fi Weirdo Rippers.

The sounds included are as much a product of unnatural selection as ever: static, samples, tambourine and what might well be whales make the mix.

Now comes the hard part: the vocals.

Spunt’s sloppily distilled vocals find their focus from behind the drum kit, and because they’re also buried behind it, they most often resemble a sweet, sweaty afterthought.

The track introductions are protracted, as if searching for a chorus they never find — but when the melody hits, as in the 2-minute-41-second beauty of “Eraser,” they’re always worth the wait.

All in all, the greatest complaint about No Age’s brand of noise-punk-nu-surf-fuzz-rock-shoegaze-genre-genre is that it sounds a little too practiced to fully pull of its “Practice? What?” intentions.

But all of this fades when you consider that No Age’s album number two is really more a debut than their last, which was more an anthology of previously released singles.

While Weirdo Rippers introduced the pedal-pushers, Nouns is more likely to define them: No Age- (n., of course) noisy L.A. duo with a tendency to produce almost physical songs that are sometimes hard to listen to but always easy to like. That No Age is so deeply rooted in a sound without a current scene is the stuff of tragedy, but with a sonic aftermath like this one, perhaps that’s for the best. This isn’t easy listening, and there is no easy lesson — not here. And why should there be?

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