Tuesday, October 22, 2013

No Age - An Object


What once was a band of fury, noise and excitement has now turned into the same “bullshit on the stereo” that vocalist Dean Spunt talks about on An Object. It is a forgettable attempt at changing direction, stripping the two pieces down to a sound that actually sounds limited by the duo approach.
If you think that by scaling back on the noise suddenly shines a light on No Age’s lyrical prowess, you’d be mistaken. It only illuminates how the band’s depressive funk has seeped into their word content, hitting a low with the clichéd “the road is fucking tough” subject matter, “Running From A Go-Go.”
You wanna know the difference between it and, say, Dokken’s “Alone Again? Not much, aside from the fact that Don Dokken managed a few more scales (ditto guitarist George Lynch) than Spunt is capable of, and believe me, I didn’t go in to An Object expecting to find correlations between them and some shitty hair metal band from thirty years ago.
The fact that it took nearly three years for An Object to land on our laps may indicate the "Do we have to?" feeling that permeates on the entire thing. Suddenly our heroes overthink the entire concept of their action plan on album number four, dwelling in a mucky puddle of annoying drones and lackluster arrangements.

No Age claims that it's our Occupied existence that's sucking away at their creative juices, but the reality is that there's very little energy from a dead battery, and perhaps this alkaline duo is headed straight for the trash bin.

No Age proudly remind everyone that the first 10,000 copies of An Object were hand-printed by the band themselves, neglecting to mention that the attention to detail inside the package is what everyone's gonna miss the most.


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