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.
A guitar/drums duo (Randall and drummer/vocalist Dean Spunt) with a penchant for self-recorded samples, No Age are mostly unconcerned with things like space or pause, and Nouns is gorgeously thick-- a hazy, delirious expanse that's both comforting and disorienting. Opener "Miner" begins and ends in murk, and in between Randall and Spunt sputter and twitch and pound, alternately revealing and concealing a sweet, taut melody-- such is No Age's agenda, burying an addictive little singalong in layers of effects and fuzz.
"Eraser" is more immediately user-friendly, opening with sunny guitar chirps and a knee-slapping drumbeat, before Spunt starts barking intelligible lyrics ("Wait for the foreman now get paid/ Wait and see the list of shit you made") and the music goes steady and frantic. "Eraser" is a summer song in the sweatiest, most realistic sense-- it's not the Beach Boys' gooey, über-idealized, convertibles-and-beach-volleyball version, it's the waiting-for-the-bus, sweaty and desperate but still-sorta-excited-about-all-that-sunshine take. "Here Should Be My Home" is similarly exuberant, full of power chords and distortion; it's arguably the poppiest thing No Age have recorded to date (all those cries of "baby" are practically bubblegum), and accordingly, completely addictive. "Sleeper Hold", meanwhile, is the sound-- both literally and metaphysically-- of everything happening all at once, an ecstatic, feedback-addled lullaby.
Some fans might pine-- at least at first-- for the (vaguely) more experimental, less riff-driven muck of Weirdo Rippers, but Nouns is a more thoughtful, coherent (and still plenty dirty) version of what No Age began building with all those EPs. Listening to Nouns, it's hard to comprehend how just two people can manage to make so much noise while still sounding so subdued and mysterious-- it's easier to imagine Randall and Spunt spewing these songs underwater, bursting forth from some colossal California quarry rather than a tiny, stuffy art space a few blocks from L.A.'s skid row. Nouns is so cacophonous, so fertile, and so ripe with sound that parsing out the samples and effects and various layers of guitar is nearly impossible; besides, it's way more satisfying to just close your eyes and just enjoy it. Ultimately, it's part of No Age's allure that Nouns is so difficult to figure out, that it manages to be so big while coming from a place so small: All you'll know for sure is that you want to listen longer. Maybe forever.
