Dean Spunt and Randy Randall have spent 13 years unraveling the dualities that speak most to misfits: the beautiful and the ugly, the harsh and the bright, pop and noise. “Fever dreaming! Fever dreaming!” they shouted on their 2010 LP, cutting to the heart of everything amid a radiant mix of ear-drilling dream-punk and tugging vulnerability. No Age—named after a 1987 comp of SST instrumental music, perennial global ambassadors to Los Angeles DIY art space The Smell, immortalized with a beguiling rainbow-ombre logo—still present this, a tattered and abrasive vision of the ecstatic.
Snares Like a Haircut is No Age’s latest glimmering and grating progression. It sounds like holding a power saw up to the sun. After their last album, 2013’s slightly more abstracted An Object, No Age seem to have deconstructed their approach and analyzed the blistering pieces, viewing them now in a reinvigorated and relatively more refined way. The five-year break, though, was owing to life: Both Spunt and Randall became fathers. (For a glimpse of what Spunt’s been up to these days, see this endearing video of his young daughter persistently crashing/improving his recent performance at an art gallery in New York.)
Their first album for Drag City after three on Sub Pop, Snares Like a Haircut is also No Age’s most dynamic collection by some margin—their version of a proper rock record. If its nervous system is running on hooks and speed, then its blood is sublime, sparkling noise and emotion. Back in 2009, No Age performed a pair of Hüsker Dü classics alongside Bob Mould, “New Day Rising” and “I Apologize”—which Spunt called a “very mystical” experience that helped them put a magnifying glass to the songs—and whatever No Age learned there, they have applied the lessons on Snares Like a Haircut more fully than before. It feels utterly fresh, like thawing or spring, and it rips.
No Age have finessed their extremes. “Tidal” opens like a kind of experimental folk song, with hardly more than Spunt’s unvarnished voice, before bursting into color: “Hurt so much on the way down,” Spunt sings, “I feel every branch and thorn/For all of time.” Vulnerability is still No Age’s best move. Over the record’s remarkable industrial sprawl, Spunt brings this to the fore with raw lyrics and latticed melodies. It gives every song, even the sad ones, the life-affirming levity that elemental rock bands are always after, as if No Age are finally rolling down a window for air. “Drippy” has the indie-pop bounce of a careening C86 tune, and the inquisitive, existential “Send Me” is maybe the closest No Age have gotten to a sky-beckoning pop-punk ballad. “There’s so much that I wish I had,” Spunt sings, “Another room perhaps and then/I wouldn’t feel so bad.” No Age are still a punk duo in practice, but on this clear-eyed LP, Spunt and Randall draw most from punk’s impulse towards attentiveness and honesty.
They allow plenty of room for artful, minimalist edges. Spunt and Randall’s conceptual and visual sides come through on “Third Grade Rave,” an instrumental loop of a diamond-cut jam; you feel as though you’re in the room with them, at arm’s length. The title track, meanwhile, is a generative pastel-shaded drone that rattles and flickers wordlessly. These ambient-noise pieces are seamlessly incorporated; they never feel like deviations. Instead, they sound like moments of inspired reinvention, like symbols of a greater commitment to the band’s own creative growth. As much as No Age use Snares Like a Haircut to outline their best traits in boldening Sharpie marker, ensuring their permanence, they also keep changing.
One of No Age’s earliest songs—included on 2007’s Weirdo Rippers—was called “Everybody’s Down.” At the core of its tinny production was a simple but powerful line: “Everybody’s down/In every soul/In every town.” It makes me think now of the 2010 DIY guidebook In Every Town: An All-Ages Music Manualfesto, in which No Age—alongside their Smell comrades of yesteryear Mika Miko and Abe Vigoda—are cited as the primary example of how “the small creative choices involved in having a venue and putting on shows have wide-ranging ripple effects.” If those effects include the unlikely autonomy of two musical outsiders, they still ring through Spunt and Randall’s wise songs. It has now been over a decade since The New Yorker first reported on the half-pipe in No Age’s backyard, and Randall’s efforts to improve The Smell’s bathroom situation. But in 2018, No Age’s name seems self-actualizing. And in their psycho-candied sound, which has progressively gotten better, they still know how to locate the timeless, fever-pitched feeling of a beginning.
