No Age - Nouns

Sub Pop

Two years ago, No Age rose from the ashes of defunct Los Angeles hardcore band Wives and immediately carried on where they had left off, leading – along with Mika Moko and The Mae Shi among others – a vibrant DIY scene centred around small, downtown L.A. club, The Smell. Following the release of a string of vinyl singles, each on a different label, FatCat Records compiled the songs and last year released Weirdo Rippers, a singles collection that was far more coherent and powerful than it had any right to be.

The duo – Randy Randall on guitar and Dean Spunt on drums and vocals – have struck gold with a formula that defies reasonable explanation. Theirs is a heady mix of hardcore lo-fi punk rock and the dreamy, effects laden guitars of shoegaze. Spunt’s drumming is rudimentary and stoically unflashy, smacking you in the chops as if to say “What are you looking at, punk?” His vocals are similarly untutored, but there’s a strangely wistful kind of longing in his flat whine. Randall’s guitars, on the other hand, do the work of three men. With no bass player and a whole other dimension to the music, he simultaneously anchors the songs, drives them forward and splatters all manner of gorgeous, seasick effects on top. It shouldn’t work, but it does and on debut album proper Nouns, they’ve managed not to drop the ball.

Where Weirdo Rippers was often wispy and ethereal, several tracks being either instrumental or half-composed of little more than the blissful effects coaxed from Randall’s guitar, this time the focus has sharpened a little. Only two short tracks are instrumental and there’s nothing quite as dreamily elegiac as ‘Neck Escaper’. But it grabs you by the balls from the outset, with the fantastic ‘Miner’ betraying the duo’s My Bloody Valentine fixation, and not for the first time. Opening with a churning swell of guitars and rustling percussion, it explodes into life in the manner of MBV’s ‘Only Shallow’, but with an LA slacker on vocals rather than Bilinda Butcher. A pretty, droney interlude leads into the first single, ‘Eraser’, but the next song is where the fireworks happen. ‘Teen Creeps’ is a cacophonous treat that only lets up in order to get going again and blast you against the wall. ‘Sleeper Hold’ is another keeper, bursting out of the formless, disorienting ‘Keechie’ and sounding for all the word like a lost classic from 1988. Elsewhere, there is Liars-esque spooky avant-rock on ‘Things I Did When I Was Dead’ and even a little country jauntiness on ‘Ripped Knees’.

There’s just no-one else around that sounds quite like No Age. Sure, their sound pilfers from all over, but few are the bands that can punch you in the face with furious punk rock and then, often in the same song, send you into glorious reverie with a galaxy’s worth of warm, gauzy fuzz. It’s a winning combination. Chris Jones

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DOWNLOAD: ‘TEEN CREEPS’, ‘SLEEPER HOLD’, ‘MINER’.
FOR FANS OF: SONIC YOUTH, MY BLOODY VALENTINE, LIARS

Issue #51 - I Told You This Would Be A Good Issue

Featuring Biffy Clyro, Of Montreal, Duke Special, Frightened Rabbit, Cold War Kids, Jay Reatard, Pat Mills, and more.