No Age - Nouns

I recently got my hands on the new album by the band No Age, Nouns. No Age is an experimental rock band, based in LA, and signed to the label Sub Pop.

Sub Pop is known for working with artists like Death Cab for Cutie, Flight of the Conchords, Hole, Nirvana, the Smashing Pumpkins, and Soundgarden.

The album as a whole is pretty short, burning through 12 tracks in just over a half hour. The whole album has a very unprofessional, garage band type sound to it. Mike static and amp feedback is left on the vinyl, and often overpowers the songs themselves. The album is also very unbalanced aurally, with some very high pitched tones, but minimal bass to balance it out. There's quite a bit of overdubbing done, to make up for the fact that the band only has two members. Nouns pulled in a 78 on metacritic.

The first track, "Miner", is fast, dissonant, lacking in any bass whatsoever, and the lyrics are very difficult to make out.

"Eraser" is a little more coherent. The high strung guitars still drown out most of the lyrics.

"Teen Creeps" has an annoying feedback in the background that hurts my ears.

"Things I did when I was Dead" features a specifically engineered dissonance, generated by taking the same vocal track, and layering it twice, the second time a split second behind the first.

"Cappo" is the first track that I found genuinely listenable. The drummer is actually fairly talented.

"Keechie" is an okay ambient piece, but it really seems like someone just decided to tape a band's warm up session.

"Sleeper Hold" is a pretty good song. They have solid tempo variance. But the lyrics are a bit repetitive.

The lyrical delivery on "Errand Boy" is really bland. But the guitar work is decent.

"Here Should Be My Home" is dissonant, and the lyrics gradually get buried by the guitar work. It almost seems like the guitarist and lyricist are going through a spat over who's the most important member of the band. It's kind of cute, in a high school garage band sort of way.

"Impossible Bouquet" starts off with a strained amp static noise in the background that really bothered me. It spoiled the song for me, which is a shame, because the string work on the guitar is good.

The cleanest song on the album is probably "ripped knees". Even including the last minute which is just a few guitar chords on a badly tuned amp.

The last track is "Brain Burner", it has the most audible lyrics of the album.

In the end, most of Nouns is noise, and combined with the repetition, it shapes up into an audio assault on your eardrums. I finished listening to this album, and shortly thereafter developed a nasty headache. The image I got while listening to the album was of a couple of high school kids trying to emulate the overdubbing style that made Billy Corgan famous, only to completely forget that it only works if the layers are sonically distinct.

Perhaps you might enjoy music like this, but I do not. It's not Metal Machine Music cacophonous, but you can see it from here. I really can't recommend this album to anyone. I'm giving it a 3/10.

Happy Memorial Day Weekend!

Four day weekends are always a good thing. But, sometimes they get a little long. I don't have classes on Friday, so life is good.

Thursday kicked off with inviting some friends up to Strega, the new bar that opened up on the sixth floor of the new condo complex down at the end of second street. It's a great place, good ambiance, good drinks, and comfortable seating. They actually stock Cachaça, and they can make a decent caipirinha. I was shocked. I had a caipirinha while waiting for CJ to arrive.

I wound up waiting for about a half hour, because CJ somehow got lost. Not sure how he puled that one off, it's on top of the only building taller that three stories other than Reser and Gill. It's kind of like not being able to pick me out of a crowd of midgets. However he made it eventually, and brought his girlfriend, and our mutual friend Brian.

We got another round of drinks, and I had a Gin and Tonic, while CJ ordered something with Strega's special liqueur, which tastes like a liquefied alcoholic breadstick. We talked for a couple of hours about work, the future, spectacular bike accidents, spectacular rafting accidents, injuries, and other things. Maybe I'll write about some of those later on.

Another round of drinks came in, and I had a Vodka Martini. It was the Vodka Martini from Hell! First off, Strega has huge cocktail glasses, double size. Second, it's alcohol and more alcohol, pretty much just four straight shots of Vodka and Vermouth. To top it off, the bartender didn't add enough ice to the mix, so it wasn't cold enough. It was just brutal. I struggled to put it down, and gnawed on the olive like it was going to save my life. It was rough, and things went downhill from there.

Someone got the bright idea to swing the conversation to politics right before we left. We proceeded to spend the next hour and a half standing in front of the entrance arguing. I hate arguing politics with my friends, because we're inevitably drunk at the time, any argument involving drunk college students inevitably breaks down to someone just yelling slogans. This particular argument ended with CJ's girlfriend telling me to get cancer and die. And she's normally such a cheerful little girl. That kinda killed the mood, so we went our separate ways.

Friday I woke up with a brutal hangover, which I usually don't suffer from. I chalked that up to the Hellfire Martini. I studied a little, read a little, and drank a ton of water.

After cleaning up, I met some friends over at the Fox and Firkin for some pre salsa dinner. Rob was flirting with the hot, pierced waitress., Nikki. I talked Milspeak with Tristan, the former Marine, while Chris taunted me about having Tara consume her sandwich faster that I devoured mine. Hey Chris, after doing the one minute challenge at Ft. Benning, I take my time with food when I can. Deal with it. I had a Cordon Bleu sandwich that tasted great, and a pint of Black Butte Porter. Erin taunted me about the fact that I look somewhere in the vicinity of ten years old in my facebook picture, and Nancy said she didn't believe I was old enough to drink. Jeez, when it rains it pours. Nancy ordered this inhuman brownie, that was covered in whipped cream and walnuts, and two scoops of Neapolitan ice cream. She distributed spoons, and the 12 of us there devoured it.

At Latin X, things kicked off as usual. I grabbed a Vodka and Tonic from the bar, and settled down. I saw a tall nice looking girl, and asked her to dance. "I don't know how to dance, I'm warning you!" Normally any girl who finds herself at Latin X without learning salsa says that, but they know enough about rhythm and dance in general for me to work with them. With this girl, I should have listened to her. I would describe it as dancing with a cannonball. When I led her in a direction, she flung herself that way. No control at all. I locked her up in a closed dance for the safety of everyone around us.

The next embarrassing incident happened during a meringue song. I looked up at the tables, and called a girl to come down and dance with me. She came down, and right before she got to me, her friend, whom my friend Sam had asked to dance, shot him down, and dragged me onto the dance floor. Awkward, awkward, awkward... Sam proceeded to ask the girl I had asked to dance, so they danced, and we danced, and things kind of evened out, but it just felt awkward. I made it up to the girl I originally asked on the next floor, but I just felt a little out of control the rest of the night.

I wound up going home earlier than usual, at 1. I just wasn't into it as much as usual. I hit the rack, and slept the sleep of the exhausted.

I spent most of Saturday just feeling drained. I don't know why, but I didn't like it. I laid around the house, watched TV, made a blog post, but generally did nothing important.

On Sunday, Joe called me up, and we went over to McMenamin's for some drinks. The pool tables were locked down, so we went to Tailgaters. There weren't very many people there, and it was karaoke night, but the pool tables were free, so we played three games. I took the first two, but I couldn't sink the 8 ball in the third.

As we were playing our second game, some guy came on, and just murdered "Dirty Laundry", by Don Henley. It was awful. Not in the so bad it's good type, but the so bad it's terrible type. Somewhere in Texas, Henley is rolling in his grave, and very confused, seeing as he's not dead yet.

I got a couple of hours to kill before I go to a party to watch the hockey game. The Flyers are gone, so I don't really care about who wins, but I promised Joe I'd make an appearance, we'll see what happens.

The Worst Song Ever.

A survey conducted in the 1990's about the least enjoyable aspects of music have driven Kolmar and Melamid to enlist the assistance of composer Dave Soldier to create what they have titled "The Most Unwanted Song". Brought to my attention by the Wired Blog, it is estimated that less than 200 people in the entire world would find this song enjoyable.

Unlike Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, The Most Unwanted Song is not just dissonant noise. It's just that annoying. Among the elements Incorporated into the song were accordions, bagpipes, banjos, flutes, tubas, harps, organs, and synthesizers. It involves operatic rap, and atonal singing, advertising jingles, political slogans, and Muzak. It has a children's choir singing holiday songs. The most annoying subject? Cowboys and holidays.

When you combine all these ingredients, you get a 25 minute abomination that is scientifically the most annoying song ever. Having listened to it, I can attest to that fact.

You can download the Most Unwanted Song here.