Opening with a incessant drumbeat which could be the sound of your fourteen self being woken up for school by your mum thumping on your bedroom door in some sort of repetitive, nightmarish loop, the opening track on No Age’s latest album ‘Life Prowler’ seems, well, business as usual for the band. But then the sickly sweet guitar line joins the fun before another equally evocative piece of guitar, only slightly coated in distortion reveals itself. The song builds with epic glacial drippings of synth and heady rushes of punk guitar in a near breathtaking ebb and flow rarely heard in this LA duo’s songs. Quite a start, and while it’s hard to think of it as breaking the No Age mould, it certainly grooms then molests it into appealing shapes.
Everything In Between continues steadily down the track paved out on the opening track. Equally grimy as it is warmly radiant. The surprisingly beautiful melody of the bittersweet ‘Glitter’, for example, is just about tangible from underneath the soggy layers of feedback noisy screeches, while ‘Common Heat’ narrowly manages to shrug off the potential pitfalls of being a blatant slacker ode to become a strangely introspective yet uplifting song.
These moments, as well as several others on the album, are frankly lovely and often breathtaking. It’s when these songs end, though, that the album and No Age go from some sense of deep rooted inspiration and creativity, to having all the depth of a muddy puddle. ‘Skinned’, for example, sounds like a cast off for In Utero Nirvana; stagnant, tepid and just boring. ‘Shred and Transcend’, meanwhile, could be literally anyone. Us Brits tend to like skuzzy garage punk, particularly if it’s done by Americans, but this a largely pointless exercise in samey three minute punk songs sung in a purposefully apathetic style.
Everything In Between, then, tends to suffer from too often regressing into what No Age first made their name from. Trashy, thrashy punk songs. They used to do this so well but now they’ve seem to have out grown these roots. Only, they haven’t quite yet. With Everything In Between, we see No Age stuck awkwardly in some sort of limbo, like a young teen in the grip of puberty, who becomes confused with where they’ve come from and where they are going. The shoe gaze influenced, strikingly evocative, often highly experimental songs on this album are utterly unbeatable. The other half of the album, unfortunately, only serves to lower the expectations of what a two piece noise-punk band from LA can do. No Age are not going away anytime soon and with some of the evidence on this album, they surely have a masterpiece up their sleeves. This, though, is just not quite it. - Gavin Williams
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