No Age - Nouns

I'm not gonna pretend I would've made this statement without the mutual excitement of an awesome new friend to bolster it, but yeah. The three people I know who've heard the No Age record already (self included) all consider it the best thing 2008's coughed up so far.

I'm not gonna give it an A+ like I bestowed a certain, slightly-less-essential-in-retrospect iTunes-only EP a few months ago, but I'll say this. Nouns is a fantastic record that meets all my favorite requirements: short, loud, noisy, simple, exciting, unusually produced, catchy, hits all the right nostalgia buttons, follows the right rhetoric (THIS IS FOR THE KIDS!), uses techno as a basis for sound effects and odd timbres rather than a compositional ideal. And for all the post-Sebadoh/Pavement slightness, they're all songs. Even the instrumentals. They also occupy the perfect integer of resonance in my cortex, upright enough to retain the effect when it's over, blurry enough to obscure the songs. This elicits the same reaction every single play, when the all-songs-under-three-minutes-but-one lunchbox opus starts up a new one with a title I forgot and a riff I instantly recall.

And to go out on, I'll do the Dombal thing and paraphrase co-Ager Dean Allen Spunt from an as-yet-unpublished interview I spent a week transcribing out of dutiful intern love:

"We really just wanna make music that we…there’s no parts in our music that we don’t like. That’s why a lot of times, the songs are one part over and over again. Or like, two parts, you know what I mean? A lot of times you don’t need the third part, a bridge or a fucking verse. You just need like one part to be so dynamic, one part can be changed, it’s like “ha ha!” then it’s over. Right, right, one good part. There’s no time for that…like we’re gonna fucking die at some point. Like, why put an ok part, why waste people’s time? Why waste our time, you know?"

That's a man I'll entrust my ears to.