No Age - Everything In Between

Age and nostalgia have nothing to do with it: what No Age does pales in comparison to what has been handed down before. Moreover, it was more rebellious, more dangerous, and it didn’t have the luxury of working in the wake of a few dozen pioneers benefiting from clever genre titles.

Speaking of: No Age’s third record is better than its tightly wound predecessor Nouns because it’s taking some risks at widening their noise-rock roots and putting those bits of distortion, scratches, and squawks into neat little boxes of verse-chorus-verse.

It’s a blast, for sure, particularly with the rapid-fire “Fever Dream,” a three and a half minute blast of Sonic Youth expressway with a chorus consisting of nothing more than guitar sirens.

“I want to steal everything from you” goes a line from the album closer “Clem Trails,” and No Age makes no secret of the blatant influences that abound in this record. The band lifts, steals, and plagiarizes to the point where I’m sure there are kids spinning this record today who are hearing it as groundbreaking stuff.

It’s not, but it is progress for these two and it’s good enough to encourage them and their muse to lift freely from the SST Superstore.

The hooks are loaded in front, and as Everything In Between proceeds ahead, the songs get noticeably more heady and intriguing.

Members Randy Randall and Dean Allen Spunt starts fucking around with guitar loops and shoegaze patterns on the instrumental “Dusted” before leading into another worthy vocal-less “Positive Amputation.” Over a slow piano, a wall of distorted guitar repeats four notes until a lengthy fade-out begins.

It’s off-shoots like these that give Everything In Between a nice start to finish feel. No Age clearly have seen that the key to their relevance is through longevity, and with noise-rock stomps clearly having a very limited self-life, the duo have begun focusing on making more than what their original formula allowed.

It’s less about “growing up” or “maturing” and more about coming to terms with the idea that there’s very little chaos left in merely replicating the noise of No Age’s forefathers

This review originally appeared in Glorious Noise.