No Age – Nouns, et al

First of all, Tha Carter III is good, only a letdown if you were expecting the album's release to be accompanied by a hip-hop-apocalypse and subsequent rapture where Biggie, Pac, and Main Source would separate the wheat from the chaff once and for all. Yes, "Lollipop" is "Lollipop," "La La" is almost wonderfully strange but probably too dinky, and "Mrs. Officer" is stoopid but not Retarded. Let's be clear on this: Wayne does not exhibit the kind of wacko free-associative genius that made Drought 3 so terrific, nor is he as impassioned as he was on the leaked Carter III tracks.

But he's thoughtful is what he is. I worried that Wayne's own hysterical rate of production would combine forces with frenzied internet discussion and send him over the deep end for good. But the record is a really well structured affair that knows exactly when to let itself go insane (see "A Milli" and most of all "Phone Home"). The production on Carter III is fairly muted, with lovely, expensive-sounding strings tying many of the tracks together. The best track is "Dr. Carter," which matches jazzy, utterly seductive production by Swizz Beatz to Wayne's most meticulous rhyming. Check this out:

Respect is in the heart
So that's where Ima start
And a lot of heart patients don't make it
But hey kid! –plural– I graduated Cause you can get through anything if Magic made it
And that was called recycling
Or re-reciting something cause you like it so you say it just like it
Some say it's bitin' but I say it's enlightnin'
Besides, Dr. Kanye West is one of the brightest.

The heart patient, of course, is hip-hop. Tom Breihan reported that Kanye was visibly disconcerted onstage by what he'd heard from Carter III at NYC's Summer Jam, promising to go to the studio that very night to work up some new shit. THIS IS A REALLY GOOD THING. Wayne's lines in "Dr. Carter" reminded me immediately of a great moment from Ye's "The Glory," where he raps, "When I die, I wanna be compared to Big / Any one, Big Pun, Big L, or Notorious." It's the "any one" that makes that line so lovely, so generous, without dulling any of Kanye's competitive edge. Wayne is a bit too goofy to come out and "compete" with any single MC, but Kanye clearly looms large on Carter III. I hope they keep looming large in each other's eyes for a long time.




But NOW! The Meat and Potatoes!

Nouns, seriously, is a gorgeous album, a big shimmering undersea world of distortion and feedback married to a terrific sense of craft and sequencing. Sasha Frere-Jones deserves much credit for pointing these guys out last November, which is what like thirty internet years ago or something? If I were 14 years old right now and heard Nouns, I think I might listen to it twice daily right up until my sophomore year of college, at which point a train-wreck of a romance would lead me to Scott Walker. That would be a dark time, but I would emerge stronger, bolder, a better singer. But yeah, Nouns reminds me of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea or Loveless–the sense of discovery is really strong.

And Loveless is probably the best point of comparison. They're both albums which feature heaving waves and slabs of moaning, roaring guitars as well as vocals which emerge from and then recede back into the band's hazy bliss. The difference is this: Loveless, front to back, is an album which speaks sounds like Melville speaks words (that is to say, fluently, perfectly, with absolute confidence, rightness, and command of every nuance). Nouns teaches itself to speak as it goes along. Here's another way of saying it: Loveless is possessed, a prophet. Nouns is a preacher who finds his voice over time, interlacing hard work and revision with rushing currents of inspiration.

Compare the two beginnings. Loveless with those four drum hits that explode into a fully-realized instrumental world that contains everything the record will have to offer. Nouns opens with a hazy riff that rocks gently back and forth in sleepy stasis but for a slightly jittery maraca rattle, but then from nowhere four knocking hits that introduce the all-enveloping guitar in a similar way. As "Miner" continues, however, a male voice fades in just a little. It's never intelligible, but you can pick out "I hear" at the beginning of each line. I hear what, exactly? In each of the next three songs, the vocals are pushed forward in the mix, trying to be heard, trying to speak, until the album arrives at its first song which doesn't need to spend a minute creating itself, "Things I Did When I Was Dead." This one is quiet, and easy, and gracefully composed from start to finish.

The album's final song, "Brain Burner," also just kills.

Nouns may have even nudged me away from beats and electronics toward guitars for a time (even Carter III features the ol' ax, hell Wayne plays the guitar–horribly–at one point). What with Simon Reynolds having lost his own faith in beats and Peter having all kinds of trouble finding music to like this year, maybe it's a good time to see if this L.A. scene can make something of itself. I should mention a really outstanding electronic record which will be released in July, though. Blevin Blectum's Gular Fluttler is as terrific as all of her other albums. It also, like Nouns, teaches its tracks how to get off the ground, although whereas it's a case of learning how to speak for No Age, with Blevin it's more an issue of learning how to turn a machine into a body and then a body into a spirit.