Wash Away What We Create

No Age “Teen Creeps” – I feel a little bit conflicted about No Age. I’ll try to explain.

Some people are very excited about No Age’s new album Nouns, and for the most part, they are All The Right People. This complicates things, mainly because I don’t think No Age is a fully-formed band at this moment in time, and I worry that they might get screwed over/screwed up by Certain People overrating their juvenilia, whether it’s out of genuine enthusiasm, or because it is beneficial to Those People’s brand. This rarely works out — either the artist hedges their bets, and feels no need to progress, or they develop their skill and create better material, and the audience moves on to smothering some other inexperienced band.

Anyway, it’s not hard to grasp No Age’s appeal. I’ll break it down:

1) After years of 80s throwbacks in the indie world, No Age represent the first step in a shift toward 90s sounds. However, since these trends are weirdly shackled to actual chronology, No Age deal with sounds particular to the late 80s and very early 90s. (As in, pre-1992.) There’s a lot of Dinosaur Jr., a smattering of pre-Loveless shoegazer rock, and a dab of punky proto-grunge, a la Mudhoney. (“Teen Creeps,” the band’s best song by a considerable distance, basically sounds like an especially woozy Mudhoney tune.) Sub Pop’s press release name checks Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation, but frankly, that just strikes me as extraordinary critical laziness and/or outright foolishness: Though it makes sense for Sonic Youth fans to dig No Age, No Age do not sound much of anything like Sonic Youth, no matter how noisy they get. The songs on Nouns are catchy, but they are very simple and lack the harmonic, rhythmic, melodic, or textural sophistication of anything on Daydream Nation, much less Evol.

2) No Age understand the power of a good logo, cool t-shirts, and attractive packaging. Seriously, it’s good enough that it makes me want to like them more than I do, and honestly, it’s not really even to my taste. It’s just nice and thoughtful and well-executed.

3) Apparently they are pretty good live. I am not impressed by the footage I’ve seen, but hey.

4) They fit perfectly into the current indie zeitgeist. On the up side of that, they are rocking things up a bit, and getting away from the abundance of 80s influences. Hooray for all that. But on the downside, why settle for moving into the 90s when we could move into the 20teens? Also, when it comes down to it, No Age are yet another band of faceless white guys without any charisma or musical identity particular to themselves, and their vocals are timid and consistently buried in the mix. It’s an aesthetic decision, and it’s part of a tradition, but you know what? It’s cowardice as far as I’m concerned. All of No Age’s songs would be superior if they didn’t sound so self-effacing and indecisive. There’s no personality anchoring these songs, just a sort of passive-aggressive, ethereal blankness where a distinct persona and a point of view ought to be.

5) They do have some pretty good songs, and they tend to feel very comfy after a few listens. They get into some ambient drones, but don’t go quite as overboard as Deerhunter did on Cryptograms. It’s either noise music for people who actually want to listen to music music, or pop-punk for noise dudes. That’s not bad at all, really. It’s just a question of modifying expectations, and when my peers all go crazy for something, maybe I expect too much.

(Click here to buy it from Sub Pop.)