NO AGE - An Object

There are things you can smell, even smell good, but when you taste them they turn out bland, flavorless; things that when you listen to them it seems like, yes, some trace remains, but thinking back on it they just flew by and you can't remember them anymore.

The third No Age album for Sub Pop – the fourth to all effects (see Weirdo Rippers for Fat Cat, dated 2007) – is an agglomeration, a collection of a few ideas that find useful footholds when it experiments, while it fades away when it intones the usual riffs à la Iggy & The Stooges or the "sonic drones". "An Object" is an adrenaline shock in a cold body, dark humor embodied in a comedian who'd like to get a laugh, a sonic paradox and unintentional paroxysm; there's a sense of an opening and of continuity with the old model in some moments, flanked in others by homilies ill-suited to a noise-punk band.

The ways to make sense of it, then, are either to not care about a fluctuating, uneven, at times boring content and to take "the object, the thing" as a deliberate up-and-down process, a rise-and-fall; or to hold the record in your hands, look at it, bring over a bin and politely place the product inside: the morbid fascination lies precisely here, in fact, in not managing to smash the thing into a thousand pieces, even though for certain tracks it would deserve it, for example "A Ceiling Dreams Of A Floor" or "Lock Box" (the Husker Du have already been exhumed for some time now).

The disturbed guitars are there regardless and still crackle nicely ("No Ground", "Circling With Dizzy"), but not nicely enough to make the garage's swing doors tremble; maybe it's that with money you build garages with sturdier parking spots, or maybe it's that the duo's batteries have run down a bit, but the fact remains that, either way, something salvageable is recovered: the angry screech of a car with a drunk driver in "C'mon Stimmung", in which the individual yells out of the window, accompanied by the supreme pleasure of humming in his mind the anthem of a faulty contraption (Defector/Ed), before losing consciousness and finding himself immersed in an ambient-garage that is, in the end, pleasant and transporting ("Commerce, Comment, Commence", "An Impression"), a bit like the continuous masturbation that Randy Randall's right hand performs on the guitar, in the Pixies-esque "I Won't Be Your Generator".

This latest No Age is an "empirical object", to be tried out in the headphones of anyone who distrusts ink stamps shaped like letters, of anyone who wants to try to square an imperfect circle, of anyone who doesn't possess strong emotions, but typically stumbles upon them precisely when not looking for them. 

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19/10/2013