1.
So: how was the No Age show at Bowery, you might ask? As more than a few have said: uneven. I did think that it sounded better than, say, the time I saw them outside at Emo’s — while tight, something seemed to have drifted into the mix that leveled off their sound. At the Bowery Ballroom, that wasn’t present, and at their set’s peaks, you had sheets of noise and full-blown punk energy coursing through the room.

2.
That said, the ambient interludes (which work brilliantly on Nouns — more on that in a second) never really clicked; at times, it felt like watching two dudes tinkering on stage. Which is totally cool, except that not sixty seconds earlier, those dudes were (to borrow a phrase from the band currently coming through my speakers) raging full-on. I think there’s a way to pull off that divide live, but they didn’t seem to have reached it yet.

3.
One aside: though High Places does draw from a similar busted-speakers aesthetic, their set fared a lot better. In part, I’d say, this was due to the unrelenting pulse of their music: while the group’s airier elements were in place, the low end served both as a constant and something to fill the room.

4.
One of the definite highlights of No Age’s set was the song “Eraser“. Dear lord: frenetic beats and bursts of noise — had this song been around when I was eighteen, I never would have struggled to reconcile my dual loves of punk rock and The Boo Radleys.

5.
I picked up a copy of Nouns at the show, and my initial reaction is “fantastic”: it’s got that visceral hit and enough intellectual changeups to keep the brain working.

6.
It’s worth mentioning here that No Age’s contribution to Stereogum’s recent Björk tribute is far and away the highlight of the piece. Ironic that it’s a bonus track, then, but still — unlike some contributors, they do (for me) the best job of internalizing their choice of cover and making it feel organically theirs. Admittedly, covering Björk can be a trying business — I still remember being underwhelmed by Twilight Singers’ cover of “Hyperballad”, which I’d expected to be amazing — but they pull it off.