Although both members are in their late twenties, the LA punk band No Age plays up to a sonic image of perpetual adolescence: a world of rec rooms and basement shows where every day involves going on bike rides, smoking your mom's cigarettes, and staying up late to watch 120 Minutes. It’s an intoxicating sound that has gained the attention of both the underground press and Conde Nast glossies—Sasha Frere-Jones, pop music critic for The New Yorker, devoted a three-page feature to the band and its homebase, the downtown LA venue The Smell. Last month saw the release of their Sub Pop debut, Nouns.

Like most modern indie bands, No Age are diligent students of the art of noise. Guitarist Randy Randall wields his feedback with painterly precision—the summery clouds of distortion that envelop album opener “Miner” are as indebted to Claude Monet as they are to Kurt Cobain, and the band have expressed their affinity for modern art in interviews and liner notes. (It should be noted that Nouns comes with a 68-page booklet of original photos and artwork, by LA artist Brian Roettinger.)

A few tracks in, it becomes apparent that, for all their arena-rock dynamics, the tunes are surprisingly airless. Songs either cut out abruptly around the two-minutes mark or collapse into pools of murky distortion, and the lyrics, apart from brief moments of detached emoting, run toward indecipherable non-sequiturs like "We wash away what we create / my sins like funny cards you make," which are delivered by drummer/vocalist Dean Spunt in an endearingly off-key yelp. Spunt’s vocal melodies often contradict Randall’s riffs, as if he were singing the same song in a different key, and the vox are buried so deep in the mix you sometimes have to strain to hear them at all.

This all adds up to an odd, subliminal tension that doesn’t quite register initially, but makes for pretty uneasy listening the more familiar the tunes become. Even the album’s most peaceful moments are marked by some kind of bizarre counterpoint, such as the squeaky metallic noise loop that underpins the lilting ballad “Things I Did When I Was Dead.” It’s as if the over-the-top angst of the last generation of alt-rock has been sublimated into something abstract and hidden, expressed through warped songcraft rather than screaming and feedback.

None of the tracks on Nouns are going to make it onto the radio or into movie trailers, but, compared to the home-recorded singles that make up the rest of their discography (most were compiled into last year’s Weirdo Rippers), they sounds positively hi-fi. It’s pretty exciting to hear such noisy, eccentric pop produced with glossy production values and still retain that MAXIMUMROCK&ROLL grime; No Age aren’t the first band to exploit this contrast, but…oh, nevermind. It is interesting to note that, nearly twenty years after Nirvana jumped the Sub Pop ship to sign with a major, No Age are surfing their own pseudo-stadium riffs into the glittering sunrise of 90s nostalgia, on Sub Pop's dime. Isn't it ironic? Don't you think?

No Age on MySpace
No Age on Sub Pop
Rolling Stone article on Nouns artwork