No Age
An Object
Sub Pop Records

The twosome art-pop-punksters No Age have been around for some years now, and have come up with their 4th album, An Object. Could it be an object of desire?

No Age is an experimentalist unit with two pilots, guitarist Randy Randall and drummer/vocalist Dean Allen Spunt. They spit out semi-primal pop with rough edges, often with neat melodies. An Object is no-shit, cut to the bone punk-pop with 11 tracks clocking in at less than 30 minutes. Maybe even more stripped and straightforward than their first two albums, Nouns (Sub Pop, 2008) and Everything in Between (Sub Pop, 2010)? Or maybe not, maybe it's No Age as usual? Energy, steam and stamina. Tension and temperature, circling just below the boiling point, explosions waiting to happen. Scratched and etched melodies. When hearing No Age the music of post-punk/new wave pioneers and legends Wire comes to mind (the title of Wire's 2008 album was Object 47...). Not a bad reference, if I must say. Check out: "Defector/ed" and "A Ceiling Dreams Of A Floor".

An Object is partly cool, but has got quite some 'grey' tracks on it. Fillers, if you want. I prefer their last album over this one. Way over. Nouns as well. That said "C'mon, Stimmung" is way cool, being a perfectly brutal pop song. The album fades with an epic (a No Age song lasting more than 4 minutes is sort of epic...) slow-noise track "Commerce, Comment, Commence" which leaves me a bit confused. Well, An Object is a bit confusing.

Copyright © 2013 Håvard Oppøyen