No Age, Los Campesinos! and Indie Rock's Non-Awful Year

by Chuck Eddy

So if it’s only May, and I can already tolerate four widely acclaimed indie-rock albums, does that mean 2008 is a good year for indie rock, or just that I’m lowering my standards? Then again, Times New Viking's Rip It Off diddles more bashfully and averagely than critics (including yours truly in this Billboard review) have given it credit for, and the world-beat pop of Vampire Weekend has its own well-dissected issues. And now, we’ve got Nouns by No Age and Hold On Now, Youngster by Los Campesinos!, which are both, um, okay. I guess.

With No Age, especially, I’m having trouble understanding what’s getting people so excited. As you might have read, they’re a couple of skate rats connected with an apparently uncynical all-ages performance scene revolving around a converted Mexican grocery in L.A. called The Smell; as with Ohio’s Times New Viking (with whom they’re lumped in on the MTV News video linked here), the predominant talking point is that they make inaccessibly new-fangled lo-fidelity noise that takes some serious getting used to -- a bizarre claim, if you listen to their record. Unlike, say, Lightning Bolt (a duo whose connection to a converted mill turned art-space called Fort Thunder in Providence, Rhode Island, helped inspire similar critic-love seven years ago), they don’t even sound especially avant-garde.

Basically, to my ears, their muffled and mostly arrhythmic tune-and-blur feels like indie-rock nostalgia: for the sweet glory days of Pavement or Dinosaur Jr, maybe, or the teenage-riot days of Sonic Youth. They’ve got charming CD packaging (an art gallery’s booklet worth of colored construction paper and random scene photos, my favorite being somebody’s cassette collection), and my wife points out that their guitars sound like the vague and swirling font on their CD cover looks. “Brain Burner” features audible drums, and “Teen Creeps” has halfway comprehensible words. (They've seen the creeps on their street, just like the Bush Tetras). Other lines jump out here and there, too. It’s pleasant enough. But if it’s new or “experimental” in any way whatsoever, this must still be 1986.

Four-guy/three-girl Cardiff, Wales, nerd-poppers Los Campesinos!, meanwhile, are more verbally clever and less viscerally “rock” than No Age, shambling along to a violin and glockenspiel while carrying on in hysterically high-pitched, preciously prepubescent yelps about the war economy and existential crises and their inability to dance. They also out-punctuate Vampire Weekend’s Oxford commas with a song “Knee Deep at ATP” about ellipses, apostrophes and parentheses. I like whichever male singer reminds me of the Buzzcocks’ Pete Shelley. When tempos slow, though, the emaciation gets irritating. Still, like No Age (and Times New Viking and Vampire Weekend) Los Campesinos! do sound fairly enthused. That’s certainly worth something at this late indie date. But whether it’s always worth a score between 8.4 and 9.2 on a scale of 10 is for Pitchfork to decide.