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.

It Is Now One Month Before The New No Age Record Is Released

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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.

No Age Documentary

A bit of press that fell through the cracks last month.

"Renowned filmmaker/photographer Todd Cole and experimental art-punk duo No Age joined forces to create and document a unique performance for the band's "Inflorescence." Cole and No Age were paired as part of a series of creative collaborations fostered by the Levi's Film Workshop, a temporary creative film production facility housed inside the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles.

Todd Cole and No Age are LA-based creative pioneers. Cole is a filmmaker/photographer, whose work has been exhibited internationally at galleries, museums and festivals and featured in publications ranging from the New York Times to i-D. No Age is the duo of Dean Spunt and Randy Randall, they are on a constant journey to explore the furthest reaches of sound. They set out with one particular rule in mind: To write songs that we would be psyched to listen to. They have been been at the epicenter of the DIY art-punk scene in LA, now famously known as having its epicenter at The Smell, a clubhouse where art-life/music-life welded and inspired a creative movement and attitude which has fertilized a purple patch of likeminded punkers and artists around the globe.

The No Age performance took place inside the Film Workshop, marking the close of the Film Workshop and celebrating MOCA's "Art in the Streets" street art exhibition, a groundbreaking show that saw over 200,000 visitors, breaking all attendances records in the museum's history."