eMusic Review 0
Part of Sub Pop's mission is documenting fertile underground-rock scenes, and one of the liveliest of recent years is centered on the L.A. club The Smell. Its house band, more or less, is this arty, chaotic duo. No Age's music is only a part of their broader package of design and artifact-creation, and like most of the rest of the things they've put their name on, it balances accidents and spontaneity with a deliberate, neon-gaudy aesthetic — some of the tracks here are through-composed noise-pop songs, some of them are improvised textural pieces, and in a few cases it's hard to tell. Randy Randall sings like somebody's dragging him away from the microphone (his lyrics usually abjure sense almost altogether: "It's a problem without too/ Trying to come up inside"); Dean Spunt's drumming is loud, hard and minimalist. The center of No Age's sound, though, is Randall's coruscating waves of guitar noise — sometimes just layers of grot and buzz, sometimes coalescing into itchy riffs whose simplicity connects the band to the generations of L.A. punks before them.
