No Age, "Weirdo Rippers"
One day earlier this year, No Age released five separate pieces of vinyl on five different labels. Thankfully, Weirdo Rippers collects some of the blissful and spiky highlights on one of my favorite records of 2007.
No Age are singing drummer Dean Spunt and guitarist Randy Randall. If they are just another band from LA then I am a bakewell tart. They have made an album to cherish. Starting with a couple of minutes of sirenic guitar-buzz and crashing waves, "Every Artist Needs A Tragedy" erupts into a cartoonish thrash and wail joyfully reminscent of Big In Japan's "Suicide A Go Go." This is obviously a track to start a gig and the jolt from hypnotic goosebump to full-on release makes me want to see this band and soon. "Boy Void" follows with a more metallic, clanging, rush of spunky power.
A slightly resigned feeling of nostalgia for 1977 crept over me, but No Age are not retreading a retro path. The looped feedback, stomping, and harmonic moans of "I Wanna Sleep" has a hypnotic quality oddly redolent of Matching Mole, but gravitating to an agitated crescendo that the 1973 radicals could only have attained by discovering amphetamines and/or skateboarding mid-song. "My Life's Alright Without You" seems to jumps back and forth between two songs like a distorted two-minute version of The Fiery Furnaces' entire Blueberry Boat album. Economy be praised.
In days gone by "Everybody's Down" might have been on thousands of jukeboxes. It is a simple burst of throbbing excitement, as lean as a cigarette. "Sunspots" follows, as sweet and trippy as the title suggests; lush waves seem propelled by an aching bass, if only it were five times as long. At this point, Weirdo Rippers goes beyond the contrast of alternating between styles and merges them. I hesitate to suggest that No Age have invented a new sub-genre; but if they haven't, they still might. The sublime "Loosen This Job" triumphs in blending garage aggression, stuttering static, and lush distortion, to create a sound that exceeds the sum of those parts. Sound can be a religious experience and here is an opportunity to worship, even as the line "Why are there so many records in my life" raises a smile. "Neck Escaper" starts with a looping sparkling guitar, punctuated by ticking, thudding drums, before crashing through the gears with a layer of charged fuzz and brilliant off-kilter vocals. Two minutes of listening I'll never regret.
From a crawling pace, eventually "Dead Plane" takes The Ramones to a more distorted, trancelike, and dumber place than ever before. On "Semi-Sorted" the duo use looped feedback, crunching guitars, cavernous thumps and cascading drumrolls to create an ecstatic garage/gamelan storm from the center of which Spunt calmly chants several lines, including "hope is just a word that you avoid". "Escarpement" reprises the sea that opened the album, but the waves and bleeps of sound suggest a craft going underwater on a new journey.
There is nothing in the DIY aesthetic which stipulates that energy must overwhelm all else. No Age take care to ensure that composition and melody are not sacrified. The balance between rawness and sophistication is just about perfect. The album art shows a building called The Smell, an all-ages grassroots space supporting underground art and music. Spunt and Randall have played and curated other shows there. Weirdo Rippers reminds me less of actual cigarette smoke, storage units, leaning against walls, ruining a favorite shirt, squinting to see through a bug-splattered windscreen, exhaustion, happiness, or what Don van Vliet has called "breaking up the catatonic state"; than more of paintings and photographs of those images. Again, the balance between the creation and destruction of hypnosis is adept. No Age are going to be offered a better studio, get new clothes, interviews, gushing reviews of their next record from critics who missed this one, offers of collaboration and all the rest. I hope this is not their only few minutes of mystery and raw brilliance.
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