NO AGE

AN OBJECT (Sub Pop)

18/20

“Who do you think you are? / Who do you think I am?” ask No Age on No Ground, the opening track from the duo’s excellent new record An Object. Three full-lengths (sorta) in for a band who’ve so stoically honed their brand of lo-fi, noise-laced punk, it’s an easy question, right? Almost, though on this more than any of their previous collections it’s the more abstracted, prettier and quieter compositions that are the key successes. The punk numbers are great of course: C’mon Stimmung layers squealing guitar noise over a snottier than normal vocal, coming on rather like Nervous Breakdown-era Black Flag; while Lock Box and Circling With Dizzy factor insistent pattering drums and a bitchin’ sax line, respectively. But as I Won’t Be Your Generator quickly takes a left turn – away from the crash expected after the rousing clarion calls of No Ground before it – into a pretty, plaintive smear of guitar, it becomes clear that Dean Spunt and Randy Randall have shifted their past focus. Humming synths, field recordings and buried textural noise underpin and support many of the tracks, and the percussion in songs like A Ceiling Dreams of a Floor and Commerce, Comment, Commence is often subtle to the point of fading completely in to the wall of sound. An Object’s clear peak, though, is An Impression, arguably No Age’s finest song to date. A simple percussive bass riff – punctuated with a gorgeous miniature guitar figure in the ‘choruses’ – chugs along elegantly, before breaking in to an unexpected and totally incandescent EBow/string flourish. Heartbreaking stuff.

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Words: Tom Howells