No Age’s Latest Album ‘Snares Like A Haircut’ Is A Masterful, Noise-Punk Return

Aaron Farley

Time is a slippery thing to quantify. We live our lives through a vortex of mundane tasks, scheduled appointments, innocuous meals, traumatic events, relationships, and sure, birthdays. The markers are hard to identify as you live through them, and really it’s only upon reflection that the important moments come into focus. The guys in the noise-punk duo No Age, drummer/singer Dean Allen Spunt and guitarist Randy Randall, have been considering time quite a bit lately. It’s been five years since the last time they put out a new album. Five years in which they became fathers, lost loved ones, found a new record label, and generally re-connected with the people and things that mattered in their lives outside of being touring musicians. All of it made it into their phenomenal new album Snares Like A Haircut.

“We’ve been reflecting about how we’ve been doing this 10 years, 12 years, and what does it mean? Who are we as people and where’s our place? You’re never permanent,” Randall said. “Snares Like A Haircut is an observation from a person who doesn’t know where they’re at in time. It’s a question of, ‘Who am I today? Where am I? What time is it? What year is it?'”

No Age’s latest album might be their finest yet. I don’t say that lightly. The LA duo has been pushing the envelope from the very beginning, going all the way back to their 2007, full-length debut Weirdo Rippers. There’s a confidence in Snares Like A Haircut that you can’t help but notice. These songs were designed to be played live and made to be blasted at full volume on the highway with the windows down. The music is affected by these weird, abrasive textures, but held together through tight, almost pop melodies. Bright sonic constructions clash against dark, introspective themes in this perfect, punk rock vortex. A dozen years into their career, and it sounds like Randall and Spunt have only just begun to hit their stride.

I recently had the chance to talk to Randall about how No Age has evolved since the last time we heard them, how to create something beautiful out of something grotesque, and how the sound of a single drum can tell you everything you need to know.

Can you talk about the journey it took to get to this album? What have you been up to over the past five years?

Yeah, five years goes by so fast! We finished off 2013 with the release of An Object and we toured pretty heavily for that, and then just kind of kept rolling. We were touring on and off, and then we were both at a place where we wanted to puts some roots down in our life. The life of a touring musician is a little tough and lonely, so we both just kind of hunkered down, looked around at our families and our friends and thought, ‘How do we get more connected to those things that are important to us?’ We took some time to do that. We both had children, both got married; had family members come and go. We love to play music, we’re committed to this band and this project, however, we’re only as good as what we bring to the table. The reserves of life experience, love, passion, and truth that we want to fill our art with, not to sound too cheesy or cliche, but you can run low on those things when you’re not connected to the things you love, so I think we made a commitment to re-connect to all those things, and obviously that served us as a band.

This is your first album with Drag City after working for years with Sub Pop. How did that relationship come about?

Dan Koretzky, who is the king of Drag City, the founder, runner, owner had always been a friend. It’s one of those things that happened organically as we’d come through Chicago where he’s based. He’d come to shows, he was friends of friends, we played with bands he knew. Anyway, we found ourselves after the release of An Object with our contract fulfilled for Sub Pop. We weren’t rushing to make a new record on the heels of it like we had been. I think from Weirdo Rippers to An Object, it was the second the tour ended, we’re writing for the next record. We wanted to take some time. Well, we ran into Dan while out tour in Chicago, and thought, ‘Oh yeah, what about Drag City?’ But in our minds, we were such big fans, we were like ‘Well, we’re not cool enough to be on Drag City. They’re the pretty girl in the room.’ But then talking to Ty Segall, who has had a great experience with them, we thought, ‘Well maybe we could go talk to them?’ We eventually approached Dan, he was excited about the idea, and we jumped at it.

How does the writing process between you and Dean work, and how has it evolved over time?

It’s organic in the way that it’s not scripted out or that there’s not a concept for the record and we reverse-engineer it. It’s usually sound-based, which is a good thing. Sounds will inspire us. I’m a big fan of guitar effects pedals and I have a plethora of them that I cart around. You create things where you’re like, ‘Whoa, that sounds crazy!’ or ‘That sounds weird!’ or ‘What is that?’ Since the inception of the band, we’ve always worked with this palate of samples that we self-generate. We’re collectors of odd and strange sounds that maybe wouldn’t sound attractive or musical in any other context, but we’ve trained our ears and trained ourselves into creating these things. We did this thing where we tried to build the hook around the most disgusting sound we could find. Not every song is like that, but the first two songs on the album, “Stuck In The Chamber” and “Cruise Control” have those sample elements in there, and when it’s all cooked down, mixed and mastered, hopefully, it sounds like everything is meant to be there. We create a home for this horrible sound that if you heard it on its own would make you call the cops.

Is that something you relish in? Building something beautiful out of something ugly?

I think so. At the inception of the band, if you get in your DeLorean and go back to 2006, we were in our mid-twenties, the idea of being melodic and confrontational and noisy, it felt like something we hadn’t really seen. It felt like a fresh idea in the world of music we were coming from, the sort of DIY Los Angeles world where you picked your lane. You were either a noise band, you were a dance band, you were a melodic band, but we were more interested in what happens when you overlay those things. The idea of writing the perfect pop song with the most horrible sounding elements was a theme stated early on.

Going further than that, it sounds like there’s a duality between the music and the content of the songs as well. Like “Send Me” has this brightness to it, but when you dig down into the words, it gets pretty dark.

It’s funny, there was this band from Austin, Texas called the Big Boys that spawned many imitators and genres that came after them, but they had this song called “Sound On Sound,” which was this beautiful, gentle, fragile intimate song that was in contrast to their larger, party, funk anthems. Tim, who was one of the principle songwriters in that band messaged me after hearing “Send Me” and said, ‘Ooh, I’m hearing a little ‘Sound On Sound’ there.’ In the punk community, there are those standout gems, like, ‘Wow, I can’t believe a punk band did this!’ It doesn’t fit. It’s the outlier. And for him to say that it, it was so great to hear. That song really stuck with us.

Did you have any conscious goals as you put together this album?

I think we were sort of just writing for us and what resonates for ourselves. Our tastes range from horrible cheeseball pop to things like high concept noise experiments. For us to be interested, we have to buy-in from all fronts. You can’t be too much of one or too much of the other. You have to find a balance that’s personally satisfying.

I know the live component of No Age is a point of pride. Especially coming after An Object which was maybe a bit more expansive, was there an attempt to create songs that would translate to the stage?

An Object was much more of a studio record and we found ourselves re-imagining almost the entire record. Re-arranging isn’t even the correct word, we were changing it all up. If it’s got the vocals and some semblance of the vocals? Maybe. Going into this one, we really thought, ‘Let’s write as we would play it live,’ so I stuck with my live pedal setup. To know that we could write it, and then perform it, it was like, ‘Ahhh. We did that.’ About 80 percent of the record could be presented on any given stage on any given day. We’ve always been faced with those quandaries and we’ve always thrown our hands up.

What does the title of the album mean?

The idea of Snares Like A Haircut came from a joke. Dean and I spent a lot of time driving to shows as we do, and we were listening to all kinds of music from all eras in the van and the one thing that stood out to us was that the way a snare (drum) sounds on a record, we observed, it dialed into the era in which that song was recorded. The ’80s have an ’80s snare sound, that sort of reverse-gated, reverb snare sounds that you hear on like Phil Collins or Peter Gabriel songs, and to a lesser degree [Bruce Springsteen’s] Born In The USA or Depeche Mode. Then the ’70s have their snare sound. The Motown ’60s have this wallet on the snare, snappy sound. Then the ’90s stuff we were listening to, all this hardcore stuff had these piccolo pings.

The snare, more than guitars or vocals are a signifier of time, then we sort of equated that to a haircut. Clothes can change, but you’ll see a haircut and say, ‘Ooh, that’s from a certain era.’ That was the laugh we had for a half an hour in the van and so we wrote it down, and I think as we created the record and reflecting back on the themes on the record — there is no one theme — and as new fathers, the one thing you don’t prepare yourself for is, the definition of time-warp. My concept of time as a father has permanently changed. You literally have a living growing calendar in front of you. ‘How long has it been since you were created?’

How much are you the same guys who began the band all those years ago? How are you different?

I think we had a song early on called “Get Hurt” that celebrated the idea of running straight into things. Consequences be damned. That’s where you learn the most, from those painful moments. That’s where you grow. You can’t be afraid to get hurt by throwing yourself fully into something. I think going into this era, how we’re writing, how we’re thinking, it’s almost that feeling of ‘Get old!’ The new “Get Hurt” is get old. You’re only gonna learn, you’re only gonna grow and by denying that you’re only fooling yourself and wasting that time.

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