They will play your House of Vans, serenade your New Museums, climb around your Bowery Ballrooms. But LA-based dream-punk brothers No Age always find time for the little people, headlining your skate shops, your auto-parts-store attics, your Market Hotel opening ceremonies (RIP). They will do so again tonight, as the just-announced quote-unquote secret guest at Williamsburg's dearly beloved DIY space Death By Audio, before the duo runs through an Eastern string of all-age shows. Pterodactyl and the Zulus open the $10 bill. And please, kindly, observe the management's request and don't line up outside before 8pm. DBA also stands for Don't Be an Asshole.

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No Age w/HEALTH, Cults, Ceremony
House Of Vans
Thursday, June 30

Better than: Anything you went to see last night. (Sorry Real Estate.)

The skater brand Vans has once again set up shop in Greenpoint for a month of rowdy rock shows at a warehouse, and the venue is pretty fantastic, even if concertgoers were asked to leave their skateboards at home. The gigantic space is predictably decked in Vans gear—glowing projections on the wall, a huge trailer covered in Vans graffiti outside—with parts of dismantled skate ramps lurking in the shadows. A huge garage door opens up to an outside yard where one can find sustenance courtesy of a taco truck, Italian ice carts, and (of course) a long open bar.

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​Los Angeles-based dream-punk duo No Age were being coy about the location of their not-quite-officially-announced Friday gig in NYC, but it turns out they're playing two. The first is at the KCDC Skateshop in Williamsburg; the second is an aNYthing/OH WOW/Ooga Booga-sponsored fete at the newly revitalized Don Hill's. While their reps are as yet unclear as to the price, the shows are open to the public--the first is at 7pm, the second at 11pm. Here's the flyer for the later one:

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"The idea was to have a visual identity before the band even started, before the music started. It kind of worked because people would be like, 'Dude, what is this? What is No Age?'"

Radiohead's Colin Greenwood wearing the No Age "Classic" in January 2008

Dean Spunt's first band was a punk-rock outfit called the Gromits. He was 13 and he sang. His mom had just become a partner in a family silkscreening business, so for fun, he made Gromits' T-shirts with a photocopier and sold them at school. After years of messing around with that machine, piecing together fake show flyers and reprinting punk cassette covers, the drummer became something of a designer, despite having no formal education. ("Using PhotoShop is really kind of difficult for me, but with the photocopy machine, I'm like an Olympic swimmer.") So when he and guitarist Randy Randall formed No Age, Spunt's first order of business was to create a strong visual identity. What he came up with was vertical text, built with a font he can't remember exactly (though it's probably one of the Gothics), in a rainbow blend. That logo has since become something of a DIY meme, popping up everywhere from Colin Greenwood's torso to The New York Times Book Review.

In honor of No Age's excellent new Everything in Between released today, we spoke with Spunt about the band's visual identity and that now-iconic rainbow logo. "I never get to talk about this," he said, genuinely seeming pretty stoked. "No one really knows."

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Major Lazer with Skerrit Bwoy at Jelly's Carniville

Our resident ninja photog Rebecca Smeyne spent her time at South By Southwest exploring the festival's badgeless margins--the shows anybody with a little creativity and a lot of patience could attend. From the party for Death + Taxes Magazine where No Age and Japandroids played, to the Cinders Gallery installation at OK Mountain to a random show on a random porch, she managed to catch things even the rest of us who were there didn't experience. Her photos from Austin, which aren't quite like anything else we've seen from the festival, are below.

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No Age
Above the Auto Parts Store
Saturday, October 17

Last week, No Age played four New York shows in four entirely different settings: West Village club (le) poisson rouge, MoMA's Spike Jonze Retrospective, the New Museum for director Jean-Jacques Annaud's The Bear, and a Todd P show held Above the Auto Parts Store in Bushwick. The latter is where the band still feels most comfortable, as Randy Randall explained to us last week: "We've always played places like Death By Audio, a venue with totally fun energy in the room. But sometimes, the rooms are too small and not everyone can get in. So we have to play (le) Poisson Rouge, a place with a bar, where your feet won't get stepped on, and money is paid to security guards and whatnot. That's more strange to us." Rebecca Smeyne most definitely got her feet stepped on photographing the "fun energy" at Saturday's all-ages show. Her shots are below.

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​No Age's week beats your year. Last Tuesday, the duo of guitarist Randy Randall and drummer Dean Spunt released their new Losing Feeling EP on Sub Pop. They also lined up four shows in the five boroughs that are so random and far-flung as to appear the work of four different bands. Tonight, they play West Village club (le) poisson rouge, before making a cameo at MoMA's Spike Jonze Retrospective on Thursday, soundtracking director Jean-Jacques Annaud winsome eighties flick The Bear at the New Museum on Friday, and performing at Above the Auto Parts Store out in Bushwick on Saturday night. Right as Randall was packing up both his arthouse cinema and punk-rock hats, we called to discuss what sorts of DVDs the duo take on tour, and why his band didn't score Milo & Otis instead.

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Rebecca Smeyne

Kutsher's, the land of impossible indie-music dreams

Yeah, so All Tomorrow's Parties New York. It happened this past weekend upstate and it was epic. Nick Cave played piano with the Dirty Three, who did Ocean Songs in its entirety. David Cross got so hammered Friday he could barely tell jokes. ("My goodness, fuckin' Jameson, though," he said at one poine when he went blank.) Boredoms' nine-drummer ceremonial-offering-like salvo went so far over their 75-minute time, stagehands started dismantling their kits while the drummers were still bashing away. Brooklyn's very own Oneida led a 12-hour improv jam session in a corner bar that'd been temporarily renamed the Oneida Sportsman Lounge, a fusty room that smelled, as one colleague put it, "like my mom's pants." Steve Albini, for the second year in a row, ran a poker-room that was open to anyone with ten bucks. Jim Jarmusch spoke to a tiny packed room and said things like, "When I get depressed, [I just] think of all the music I haven't heard." Crystal Castles' Sharpie-eyelined front-writher Alice did not punch anyone in the face. No Age cycled through Husker Du songs with Bob Mould; Deerhunter's Bradford Cox joined the trio for a cover of Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers' "Chinese Rocks." The Flaming Lips emerged on Sunday night through an LCD birth canal; Wayne Coyne crowd-surfed, per usual, in a plastic bubble. Later, Bob Mould DJ'd in the Oneida room and Bradford Cox hosted an impromptu, acoustic lakeside jam. It was, let's repeat, epic.

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Rebecca Smeyne

Randy Randall and Dean Spunt, apparently tired of the All Tomorrow's Parties food court, dig into a fine dish of pre-packaged carbs, fresh from the vending machine. Randy, nice use of fake-flower glass-case holder as a beer counter. And Dean, are those your drumsticks in the table? [All Tomorrow's Parties gallery]

​Three weeks ago, Sub Pop began streaming No Age's upcoming Losing Feeling on their site and now, in anticipation of an October 6th release date that's still very far away, the label is offering the EP's most rousing song, "You're a Target," for free download. It's worth pointing out that the newer No Age material sounds very little like the band's last record. And while about half Losing Feeling is a variety of vague, colorful, and abstract guitar loops--"Aim at the Airport" could almost be Belong, maybe--"You're a Target" is an anthem in a way this band never quite wrote anthems before. The song might be the best thing No Age has done yet. Anyway, whatever, don't take our word for it, like we said, it's free, go ahead, we'll wait right here.