No Age: Listening between the notes

No Age guitarist Randy Randall can take a conversation about such heady musical topics as minimalism and noise, and make a benign radio hit such as Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May” sound cool. It’s a song everyone has heard a million times, but it takes on a new mystique when Randall talks about its unusual qualities. “You can really hear the acoustics of the room in that song, and it makes you wonder, ‘What’s going on there?’” he explains. “You hear the pop elements, but your ears are torn away from them by the various other sounds in the recording.”

That kind of listening between the notes gives No Age a simple, powerful jolt that transcends the limitations of noise, punk rock and the avant-garde. The group’s sound lies at a junction between droning soundscapes and high-energy art-pop.

As a two-piece, Randall and drummer Dean Spunt blast a wall of staccato rhythms and melodies that are primitive in their rock ‘n’ roll drive while pounding through a halo of overdriven fuzz. Noise binds the songs on No Age’s debut full-length, Weirdo Rippers (Fat Cat), a CD that compiles 11 songs that were previously released as five 7-inch and 12-inch EPs, on five different independent labels. Basic punk rock is an essential part of No Age’s equation. The group crams the snarling guitars and raw punch of the Ramones and the Misfits through an all-encompassing din that evokes the fidelity of the early recordings by the Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth.

The effects of such a noisy art dynamic are similar to the works of minimalist luminaries such as Tony Conrad and Terry Reilly, who rely on a lack of rhythm, melody and imperfections in sound to draw out the patterns in a drone.

But No Age exists at the opposite end of the spectrum. Rhythm and melody are a pronounced part of the group’s approach. The tension that arises in songs, such as “My Life’s Alright Without You,” “Neck Escaper” and “Dead Plane,” lies in the tussle between plodding beats, a careening guitar, nasally chants and resonance that blurs every sound into an overarching buzz.

Randall and Spunt began shaping the aesthetic shortly after their former L.A. hardcore band, Wives, broke up. The two reconvened to pursue a stripped-down approach. “After Wives ended we cut out the parts that we [didn’t] need,” Randall says. “With just the two of us, we don’t have too many options. I can only do what I can put my hands on, so I don’t worry about the other stuff.”

Weirdo Rippers is less of a realized album than an archive of No Age’s five EPs. The disc feels disjointed in places, which is done for effect. “We think of it like the best mixtape,” Randall says. “A lot of our favorite records are retrospectives or something like Fugazi’s Repeater + 3 Songs. It’s exciting to hear two different recordings put next to each other. They inform each other in a curatorial way, or like when a friend makes a mixtape for you and you think: Why did he put this song with that one?”

This month No Age signed to Sub Pop Records to release its second album, which shows all the signs of diving even further into the din. “We were in England this year, and we scheduled a day at Southern Studios to record our next record,” Randall says. “When we were there, we found out that it was the same room where the Jesus and Mary Chain recorded Psychocandy and we just thought, ‘Whoa ... there are ghosts in this room.’ If we can get any of that kind of dust or the sound of that room on our record, we will be happy.”