 | Tracklist:
1.Every Artist Needs a Tragedy
2.Boy Void
3.I Wanna Sleep
4.My Life's Alright Without You
5.Everybody's Down
6.Sunspots
7.Loosen This Job
8.Neck Escaper
9.Dead Plane
10.Semi-Sorterd
11.Escarpment
Release Date: 2007 | |
| | other reviews | kodiaknoises (4)
LA art-punkers No Age deliver a debut CD that pays tribute to the noisy DIY scene that opened the do... | lonelyspacepanda (4)
The 90s have never been forgotten within the realm of 00s indie rock, but No Age are of a select few... |
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No Age might be wearing their California beach lo-fi buzz like a popped collar on their debut proper, Nouns, but Weirdo Rippers pastes polaroids of sweat-soaked hole-in-the-walls with off-the-cuff sincerity, where good musicianship goes for good showmanship and the two meet on the vague assumption that they’re also going for “punk.”
As far as the recent trend in lo-fi goes, No Age maintain a steady dignity because they sound bred instead of influenced; invented instead of engineered.
For a scant thirty minutes, guitarist Randy Randall and drummer Dean Allen Spunt don’t so much work out their aggression as they explore it, finding heart buried deep between crackling feedback and bait-and-switch melodies, taking cues from their previous incarnation Wives.
The final splay of songs barely even attempt to hold together some form of structure, straying from the album’s first half comprised of noisy pop tunes like fuzzy rouser “Everybody’s Down” to lull through murky rumbling.
“Dead Plane” spends nearly three minutes back peddling through melodic ambience and anthemic percussion before shifting back into gear for a blast of raw riff.
Elsewhere on closer “Escarpment,” No Age suspend a slow melody over rippling and clashing feedback, which grate and grind on top of each other before a beat separates itself and builds, never reaching its peak but simply continuing to occupy space until resigning itself to submission.
On paper this all might read stagnant and rehashed, but No Age bring a sense of revisionism that probably wasn’t intended, waxing raw, youthful jaunt over unexpected and mature composition.
Highlight “My Life’s Alright Without You” shimmies between tense looped rhythm guitar and raucous, sun-bleached pop hooks before surging into the album’s sweetest moment of energy, all tuned to the comforting sound of youthful languor (“Ooh I hate you / ooh I hate you / my life’s alright without you”).
It never sounds forced.
That the album works as a complete set rather than a mash up of 5 EPs might lend itself to the idea that No Age work better as a band who make their music like spontaneous and necessary emotional purging, the kind that attracted a cult-like following in their native LA wasteland, making a home out of the very venue that graces its cover and fitting a family into it for a few sweaty hours, rather than the byproduct of time and intention expanded into respectable fashions of a style some of us are still parsing years later.
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