With the world around us bruised and bloodied with teeth already
dug into the concrete curb, we fi nd ourselves with the shadow of
a large boot looming overhead. What better time for No Age? Remember,
they are the ones who fi rst brought you the hospital-bedfeel-
good-anthem, “Get Hurt” (2007). They know how to ecstatically
rage and power on thru pain, because what else are you gonna do?
The future belongs to the cockroaches, and this record is made for
the disparate band of misfits who 2017 couldn’t kill.
Yeah. New No Age! Not new age No Age (except for the odd “Sun
Spots”/“Keechie”-style shimmer that only ever makes everything
better), but defi nitely an age of album-making located somewhere
beyond and back from where we last heard ’em in aught-13,
when they’d wrapped their process in as much deconstruction
as An Object could bear. Reimagined rippers, compelling
ever forward; something that provokes challenges on the
ear — that was always the goal, but after a few years
spent not No Age-ing, just working on that thing
called life, is it any wonder that Dean and Randy
wanted to pump out some rock and roll for the
black hole? Does time mean nothing to you?
Don’t answer that.
Snares Like a Haircut sounds like the
good shit, and smells like the buzzy
burning off of an aura, the marine layer
suddenly vanished, leaving a thin
layer of smog over the songs, simmering
sock gazing tunes, revved and displacing enormous amounts
of sound soil. This is pure driving music, for the bus racer and the
car driver, with too many signs, bells and little lites flashing, ticking
away. This is a record for the Foothill and the Valley, with a chemical
sunset flowering at the end of every day. It’s a feeling made by driving
music for driving music.
Recorded in a few days and mixed forever, Snares Like a Haircut
finds No Age in full on mode, because there was nothing else to do
but go full on. In the songs inside the songs, the thumpy/thwappy
drums, the desperately voiced paens to determination, the churning
and the stinging-but-shiny fuck-it built into the structure, a promise
from the 1980s echoes once again across today, for the undetermined
in-between generation reality seekers.
With Snares Like a Haircut, No Age scrub the itch in the little
moments, engage actively with the process and carve/plaster/shave
something in an album shape that’ll last.
You don’t have to drive, but you can’t stay here. Let No Age do all the
driving for you. Snares Like a Haircut.