Smells Like Grammar

Each little moment in punk history has been subject to an exhausting series of “keepin’ it real” copycat artists, droning in perpetuity like a Social Distortion chorus. It’s not necessarily horrible—plus, it provides entrance points for a younger generation. But what’s more exciting is when someone takes from the best of the punk ethos (total artistic integrity, self reliance, etc.) while completely shredding up the sound. This approaches what No Age, from the scene centered around LA’s major DIY venue The Smell have done on their first proper LP, Nouns.

Last year, the duo of Dean Spunt and Randy Randall released a compilation of EPs titled Weirdo Rippers, and Nouns doesn’t stray too far from the previous record’s template. The songs are all in the three-minute range and vary from tingling, atmospheric, loop-based tracks on the one hand, to slamming, bratty singsong tracks on the other (although most tracks incorporate some element of both). Nouns still has the lo-fi sheen of Weirdo Rippers, but if you turn up the volume on tracks like “Miner” and “Teen Creeps,” careful layers of pitch-bent shoegaze careen against each other, and Spunt’s drum sounds and vocals more ably occupy their own space. The tracks still buzz and pop like cassettes left out in the rain, but now it’s more out of choice than necessity.

The compressed length and the compressed band allow for the concise expression of a single idea on any given track. On “Cappo,” a martial drum pound and light strumming build tension before giving way to a thick, hazy, head-swaying riff. “Errand boy” has a similar build up, but instead of releasing tension with a catchy figure, it dissolves into a monastic drone and a slowly spoken fade out. In addition, there’s the future-folk strumming and rhythms on “Ripped Knees” and “Eraser.”

The limitations of No Age allow them a greater latitude of reference than a more traditional setup might have. Nouns sometimes sounds like Deerhunter or their recent tour mates Liars; but there are also hints of power-pop choruses and insinuations of exultant guitar outros. With its lo-fi, hi-tech dynamic, Nouns evokes a weird sense of naive teenage nostalgia that follows the old punk rule: first listen annoying, second listen unavoidable.

May 6, Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St. (betw. Bowery & Chrystie St.), 212-533-2111; 8, $13.

NO AGE’s Randy Randall (left) on... the shortness of songs: We’re our own worst critics. We cut out a lot of stuff, hence the songs having a short running length. I think after two minutes we start getting bored. So why write a song that’s longer than that if we probably wouldn’t want to listen to it?

Nouns’ 40-page art booklet: We really wanted to create a photo book. You know, a coffee-table book of photos and artwork that we had been working on and sort of inspired by, acknowledge the places we’ve been and the people we’ve been doing things with. So in some sense, we were really hoping to make a proper photo book for its own sake, and then you get a CD with it also: or an art catalog—something that could be at an exhibition or at a gallery. We were just really excited about it, to find a way to get around the plastic jewel case.

Influences: In terms of the music we’re listening to, we spend a lot of time in the van listening to CDs and now iPods and stuff. We’ll sit there and say, “I wanna write a song like Nerves” who are an L.A. ’80s power-pop band. How would we write a Nerves song? So we look at the structures and what they’re doing, and how we could put it together. We run the gamut, like, “What would a Smiths song sound like?” I think that’s a common thing for bands: to do your sort of a take, not a cover, but something in the style of, but because it comes through us and what we generally sound like, it’ll probably be tweaked by the end, so no one would hear our original influence.

Recording Nouns: We kind of made it a point to record in a couple different places. We felt like some songs definitely warranted certain sounds. Like sometimes we’d be writing and think this is the kind of record that should be recorded through a boombox, or this is a record that should be recorded in a more lush production heavy kind of way. We were lucky to get some time in Sonic Studios in England, which was an amazing opportunity. It’s the studio where all the Crass records were recorded, and number of other seminal bands, like the Jesus and Mary Chain.

Writing new material: We’re kind of in this perpetual writing stage; as soon as we finish and turn the record in, we want to record more songs. It’s sort of our habit to constantly be writing and recording.