Since beginning in late 2005, albums from L.A. duo
No Age have been defined by where they fell in the balance between the group's straightforward hooky punk and their more experimental tendencies. When guitarist Randy Randall and drummer/vocalist
Dean Spunt find the sweet spot between blurry ambient abstraction and spartan songwriting, it generally results in
No Age's most captivating material. After spending about a decade pushing their sound to extremes of both fuzzy pop and impenetrable noise, the band's 2018 album Snares Like a Haircut found them returning to the roots of their sound by running some of their most carefully constructed songs through waves of dreamy atmospheric samples. The record felt like a refinement of their earliest euphoric hardcore, and a dialing down of some of their more extreme forays into artsy weirdness. Fifth album
Goons Be Gone continues the maturation that began on Snares Like a Haircut, but this time around Randall and
Spunt draw clearer lines between their various approaches. Relatively spare songs like "Feeler," "Sandalwood," and "War Dance" blast by energetically. The vocals are clear and unaffected while anxious drumming and multi-tracked guitar riffs egg each other on to go faster and push the songs further into the red. "Turned to String" coasts along like a punked-up
Neu, monotonous drums and minimal chord changes gelling into a fast-but-hypnotic repetition. When not zooming by at full force,
No Age explore rainy, melancholic layers of processed guitars and ambient samples on the moody "Smoothie," waves of fuzz and buried rhythms on "Toes in the Water," and glitchy randomized samples on "Working Stiff Takes a Break." In some ways,
Goons Be Gone is constructed in the same manner as the band's early singles collection
Weirdo Rippers, with stretches of formlessness opening up into exciting and immediate songs. The flow is less consistent than it's been on recent albums, but the contrast this provides takes the edge off of the more out-there segments and also gives the more traditional rockers more impact. With a number of years under their belts,
No Age's songwriting and experimentation have both reached new heights of craft.
Goons Be Gone isn't the perfect synthesis of chaos and control that
No Age have been searching for their entire career, but it finds some of their best songs and most fruitful experiments presented in a style that's never sounded more singularly their own. ~ Fred Thomas