Albums of The Year # 41 No Age - Goons be Gone

 

My new favourite band, part blah, blah, blah. Bit late on the case on this one. LA duo No Age have been around for sixteen years already, but their latest record Goons Be Gone. just out, sounds as fresh as a field of daisies.

This sound, full throttle  New Wave / Post Punk, is hardly new. It's been doing the rounds after all on a fairly regular basis since 1978. But given its familiarity, it's increasingly difficult to do it all in a worthwhile way anymore. If The Strokes, remarkably, managed to pull off that trick one more time with their latest The New Abnormal, this is the second album I've heard this year to slot into that particular category. New, New Wave / Post Punk that works, 2020.

Because this, quite definitely works. I listened, rapt from start to finish, yesterday morning, then went back to the beginning and listened to the whole damned thing again. This went on throughout the day.

This is by no means an easy trick to pull off. It's relatively simple to play the right notes when you're doing this kind of thing. It's much more difficult to convey the required conviction, the necessary desperation to come up with convincing product. Goons Be Gone has all the requisite desperation in spades. It also has the songs.

So No Age sound a bit like early Pere Ubu. They sound like a less stoned Heartbreakers. They sound like a Sonic Youth slightly less interested in scuzzing up their pretty melodies with excessive feedback so they can maintain studied cool. They have the itch you can't scratch, reckless craving of early Gun Club. They have the melody and drive of Mission of Burma. They share a few things with the best of The Strokes. They have the tunes, but they know enough to fray them at the edges so they come across with just the right sense of alienation and disaffection to get the whole narrative of doomed leather-jacketed romance across.

No Age know who and what they love. I love the same things too. Some would say that this stuff should be in a museum by now. But so long as the human heart exists and there are those who remember exactly how good this sounded the first time round and want to relive that moment again and again, there will always be an audience for this.