No Age’s gig in Exchange Dublin was so loud that it drew complaints, police, and essentially stopped gigs in the venue for nine months afterwards. That’s their thing, if you didn’t know. They’re loud. Their last record, Nouns, elevated them to at least some level of international visibility and its scorching highlight Teen Creeps damaged hearing at every stop No Age made, and on plenty of sets of headphones too. When volume is your calling card, though, you need to be great at it to maintain attention. This is the challenge on Everything In Between.
The opener, Life Prowler, is all understatement and staccato vocals being vaguely creepy, very much in the mould of the late Jay Reatard’s more ‘sensitive’ stuff. And though understatement morphs pretty quickly into waves of pure sound, the audible lyrics could be San Francisco coffee shop singer-songwriter fodder a lot of the time. That’s not really the point though – they’re rarely all that audible.
The touchstones that No Age hit – noisiness, veganism, involvement in LA’s world-beating all-ages dive venue The Smell – often help to gloss over the fact that their songs are actually pretty basic pop music at heart. When the hooks are pronounced, as on Sorts for example, the ramshackle approach lends them the quality of savant-like outsider art, masterpieces put together by accident. That’s a powerful thing. But other times, when the ideas aren’t that pronounced, the wash takes over. This is both good and bad. On the plus side, the whole album shares a balmy, mood-changing atmosphere, regardless of actual individual tracks. But on the negative side, songs like Skinned never really arrive as anything more than sound and fury. There are flecks of greatness, but nothing more.
Words: Karl McDonald
