Send "No Age " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchforkmedia |
 It's disingenuous to talk about Los Angeles' New Yorker-profiled, vegan-snacks-serving, book-lending, all-ages venue the Smell with the same high-art vocabulary you'd use to dissect other creative collectives, like Andy Warhol's Factory-- the Smell's constituency (L.A.'s optimistic experimental art pack) appears un-fixated on fame, self-aggrandizement, or furthering its nascent mythology. To an outsider, the Smell is idealistic and romantic, a stroller-friendly, cheap-haircut-hocking haven that's as functional as it is fruitful. Save Baltimore's Wham City, it's been a while since American music fans have had a similar hometown scene to get riled up about; regional culture has been fractured and marginalized by the internet, and being too focused on anything local-- except produce, maybe-- feels depressingly provincial in 2008. Consequently, it's weirdly thrilling that a community-sponsored, community-supported art space can attract (and sustain) such a horde of admirable bands. No Age, along with Mika Miko, Abe Vigoda, Lavender Diamond, BARR, and a handful of others, are mainstays at the Smell; the cover of No Age's 2007 EP compilation, Weirdo Rippers, famously features the exterior of the club, and guitarist Randy Randall reportedly helped mine trenches in the venue's concrete floor so that a second bathroom could be installed to accommodate new crowds. Given the critical success of Weirdo Rippers, No Age's scope has now expanded well beyond Los Angeles, and Nouns, their first full-length, is appropriately ambitious....full text |
| Uncut |
| Los Angeles duo No Age surfaced last year with Weirdo Rippers, a compilation of early vinyl cuts that suggested a couple of wide-eyed punk kids dudes discovering the manifold delights of effects pedals for the very first time. A year later, and singer/guitarist Randy Randall and singer/drummer Dean Spunt are ensconced on Seattle’s Sub Pop, perfecting a debut album proper that promises much more. Nouns poses an hypothesis of sorts: what happens when the punk rock of The Misfits and Black Flag meets the hissy lo-fi of Pavement’s Slanted And Enchanted and the ecstatic throb of My Bloody Valentine’s Isn’t Anything? The answer is thirty minutes and twelve songs long, bashed out with Fonz-like cool, but captured with a fuzz-soaked, dreamy production that makes good use of the tools and methods of budget production: the smeared, neo-psychedelia of hissy four-tracks and cheap guitars played through cheap pedals, applied here not through necessity, but for sheer love of the sound. No Age are still punks at heart: the opening “Miner” busts out the traps at speed, but it’s blurred and chaotic, vocals subsumed in a mush of effects. Spunt and Randell make this sound their own, though: the joyful “Sleeper Hold” imagines surfboards waxed and skate ramps traversed through a humid haze, azure guitars crashing like waves, while at the other of the spectrum, “Impossible Bouquet” offers a drifting, ambient guitar interlude with more in common with Fennesz’s Endless Summer or The Durutti Column than any more familiarly punk touchstone....full text |
| Nowtoronto |
| Despite being two-thirds of now-defunct hardcore punks Wives, experimental L.A. post-rockers No Age aren’t about the agro any more. Nouns oscillates between ginormous ear-bleeders like Teen Creeps and introspective instrumental soundscapes Keechie and Impossible Bouquet....full text |
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