A NOT PARTICULARLY CLEVER WAY OF RAISING JOHN MCCAIN'S AGE AS AN ISSUE

Like it was the backs of their eyeballs you looked at while they were hearing music you couldn't hear.
Hot Chocolate: Heaven Is in the Backseat of My Cadillac

I can see why Chuck Eddy, Matthew Perpetua, Mike Barthel, Tom Breihan and others might be less enthused than I am about No Age's Nouns, and it's clearly not just critics' natural tendency to be skeptical of what somebody else rated extremely highly. The recurring focus on No Age's role in LA's the Smell scene (they're more popular than Mika Miko because they've put out better records, guys) should rightly raise suspicions about whether that's what people are seizing on here, the process rather than the music. For me, though, as someone approaching Nouns from a perspective that's ridiculously steeped in recent indie and probably less conversant about No Age's supposed 1990s soundalikes than any of those dudes, thinking about Nouns in terms of 1990s indie rock is missing the point. I see No Age more as part of a fascinating movement that includes Liars, Deerhunter, Beach House, High Places, and others, all of whom share an interest to some extent in both punk ideals and ambient aesthetics. You listen to "Keechy" the way you might listen to Markus Guentner, not the way you listen to Dinosaur Jr. (or the way I do, anyway). When a band like Sebadoh gets loud and noisy, whether on a Gaffney song or at the end of "Brand New Love", they're rocking out. When No Age are noisy-- which there's admittedly less of on Nouns than on Weirdo Rippers-- it seems to me that they're better enjoyed for their textures, for the way they encourage perceptual drift and let us get lost in those little fuzzy tendrils of feedback and distortion where music and noise intersect (but without giving up on pop's melodies or communicativeness... or punk's emphasis on provocation and independence, if you're into that sort of thing). I haven't heard an album that does this better all year, and although an argument could certainly be made for Pavement's Watery, Domestic EP, I don't think I'm being nostalgic.