No Age at SP20

Sunday, July 13

I didn’t “get” No Age at first. But all it took was one day of gleaming sunshine here in our drippy Northwest corner and the band clicked with me. As has been reported ad nauseum, No Age hails from Los Angeles and is deeply entrenched in the all-ages, book-lending, vegan-friendly venue The Smell. Consisting of guitarist Randy Randall and drummer Dean Spunt, the band’s Sub Pop full-length, Nouns, wavers between rivers of muck and bursts of Day-Glo. The songs are gritty and dirty- like that layer of dust you get from riding the Metro in mid-August- but contain sweet summertime melodies that are slick with sweat. It’s no wonder I didn’t get them at first: No Age is very much an L.A. band interested in sounding like where they are from. And in these times, when it’s normal for a Seattle band to sound like a bunch of Northern Californians, No Age’s uber-localism is a welcome trait.

Sun., July 13, 4:40 p.m., 2008