I was driving down the street down past the big Autumn trees in my Mum's car (a snazzy little Hyundai GETZ btw) and I was listening to No Age's new album Nouns and even through where they are coming from is so far away from driving around in yr Mum's car it blew my mind in two particular places, those places being these two tracks posted here, but then again, it was kind of hard to single out which particular bits were the ones that were most amazing because with all the transitions from punk jam to ambient bliss it's easy to get lost. It's not as channel-changey as Weirdo Rippers, Nouns has much more direct pop sort of vibe but still with that awesome dirty and blown out sound captured on record with a surprising amount of clarity.
I interviewed Randy Randall (one half of the band) last week for TMT and BEAT, published soon, and here are some things that he said about various things.
re: Weirdo Rippers
"I think when we put it together, we chose the songs that really worked well together. We were kind of lucky in that way, that everything fell into place quite nicely. We didn’t put as much of the ambient stuff on the new record, I think the new record is a little bit more of a pop or rock record and I think that came out of us touring so much in the last year. A lot of the more ambient songs were difficult to translate live for us (from the Weirdo Rippers set of songs) so it kind of ended up getting less by the way side; we couldn’t tour with them so we started writing songs we could play live."
re: Nouns
"We had this idea that we wanted a good balanced record, so there were some times where we would look at songs kind of like looking at a Bonzai tree, trimming bits away, so like, “well, there’s too much going on in that one, we’ll get rid of some of that’. There was a lot more material recorded than what was finally selected for the record. So we were able to find something that really worked well as a record together."
re: punk ethics
"I’m 27 and Dean is 26 so we sort of came age at a time prior to the interent where you had to collect fan zines and go to shows and collect flyers to find out about things, listen to college radio and have you ear to the ground and search through the record bins to really find the cool stuff. We can definitely relate to that sense of it. We both grew up in different suburbs that we these kind of enclaves of nothingness where we had this time with ourselves to be bored with guitars, so we definitely identity more with the DIY aesthetic. We volunteer at a place called The Smell in downtown LA where we do sound some nights or help book shows or do the door and stuff like that. It’s just really being fans of people making things for themselves and not really needing to be asked to do it."
re: being personal to be political
"Making music is just another way to deliver that message and another way to show through example. Just even playing music is an act of rebellion against a straight capitalistic system. We definitely didn’t start this band to make money, I mean, we have been fortunate enough to get a little bit of a financial reward from it, but we would continue doing it even if we weren’t, it’s just something we have to do, we have to play music."
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