Each Tuesday, FADER editor Matthew Schnipper highlights an underappreciated recent release he thinks we need to know about. This week it's two seconds from the song "Teen Creeps" off Nouns by No Age. Buy Nouns here, watch a video of them playing it here (though the times referred to below reflect the album version) and read about it sort of after the jump.

Walking down 44th Drive to Deitch Projects on Saturday, I got a text message from my friend Justin that said “full of clowns.” I took that literally, and was excited. When I almost got hit by a car whose driver was not very good at parking and an an old man in a tuxedo walking the other way from me said “You aught to be able to pass an IQ test to get a license” I realized my friend did not mean real clowns. When I got there, he was sitting on a piece of wood with his back to a very nice view. I went inside.

There were two rooms. One had a very loud banging. It was a man dressed as a caveman hitting a lifesize butt with a bit bone and yelling. This room was where the installation was. The art was all over the walls, it was a lot of collage that looked like this and also there were pieces of countertop, fake marble and plastic wood. In the back there was a weird party. “Ballroom Blitz” was playing really loud and there were hundreds of silver balloons on the ceiling and more people dressed up like cavemen. There was a huge line for drinks and people taking pictures. Everyone was dressed super beyond fancy, the kind of fancy that gives you an appreciation for fleece. I saw Jeffrey Deitch by the entrance, he was wearing his typical pinstripe suit. He was looking for someone or something, or maybe he was just looking at the skyline on Manhattan, which is beautiful (Deitch Projects is on a pier in Long Island City, Queens, immediately overlooking the east side of the city). I read not long ago a New Yorker article of Deitch as an art advisor, amongst other things. More than his gallery work, his occupation as tastemaker, professional or otherwise, is so encompassingly compelling, to both him and readers/collectors/viewers. He has enveloped himself, enshrined his life, to art he believes in, an act that is almost separate to criticism and fault. So, to see him beside an opening looking slightly forlorn and looking, was a little bizarre. It me want to touch his shoulder and ask him if he was having a good time. I wonder if he was. I wasn’t. My friend Justin told me later this the opening reminded him of “Fort Thunder for rich people.” That was funny, but also kind of true. Aside from a common dayglo aesthetic, they were both places of loud music and a lot of people. Except one was on a big fancy pier warehouse building and one was in shitty Olneyville where you go live in a shitty warehouse because it’s cheap and that is where people will leave you alone. At Deitch, everyone was taking photos, including the cavemen who were part of the performance taking photos of each other.

It’s that weird aspect of going to a place, event creation, instead of it just happening as part of your being there, the setting out to make something to be documented, that makes me think a lot of people just missed out on some basic shit because they weren’t paying attention. In this 2002 story, "The Odds of That" for the NY Times Magazine, Lisa Belkin talks to people who work on theories related to chance. Most of them don’t think anything is surprising, they just think we notice when stuff is good. If we noticed a little bit more, maybe we’d find all kinds of things. Maybe I didn’t like Deitch because it’s just an easy thing to try hard for. It’s unexpected efforts that yield better results.

I guess that’s what I hope this column has always been about, fuck it, what I guess my life is about for better or for worse, finding shit I really like because I am kind of fickle. But then when I find it I’m always really stoked and I want to tell other people. Recently that hasn’t even been enough and I have tried to figure out why I like things. This always seemed natural to me, as this is how I approached writing (how many times I have read Jorie Graham poems in college and still not had any clue what she was talking about. But how I could so rightfully assail Ted Kooser. If deconstructionism can be such a vital philosophical school, why can’t we think of music that way?) I realized maybe I was sleeping on music I really liked by not delving. Reading the first half sentence of this review of No Age’s Nouns I wanted to barf. “It's disingenuous to talk about Los Angeles' New Yorker-profiled, vegan-snacks-serving, book-lending, all-ages venue the Smell with the same high-art vocabulary you'd use to dissect other creative collectives, like Andy Warhol's Factory.” Why is that disingenuous? They are both creative spaces. That automatically sublevels a place like the Smell, and of course in the context of a No Age review, No Age. The rest of that sentence is “the Smell's constituency (L.A.'s optimistic experimental art pack) appears un-fixated on fame, self-aggrandizement, or furthering its nascent mythology.” Who cares what they think? You’re the one reviewing it. It makes “art” a self-important, self-defining culture and creation. Fort Thunder was there and important before it was in the Biennial. Where were you? I was in high school and my parents wouldn’t let drive me that far. It sucked.

Not to get all super cool, because there is nothing super cool about the fucking jerk at the record store that knows more than you. It’s annoying and lame. But maybe that dude has a point. If he was into film or sculpture that deep, he wouldn’t be such a herb. Maybe too much Nick Hornby has ruined the way people think about people who think about music. Fort Thunder passed muster. Gang Gang Dance has. Lucky Dragons now. No Age may be on a level, but there’s no greater art love. Maybe there should be. In my computer’s dictionary, it says art is “works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.” Well, I really like the song “Teen Creeps.” I saw No Age twice last week and I was excited for this one part of the song, they do it two times (it lasts about two seconds and begins between seconds fourteen and fifteen and then again between two minutes twenty seconds and two minutes twenty-one seconds). The guitar, which for the rest of the song is played with noise sheets and layered blare is isolated for five notes and then on the sixth, the drums come in and the guitar clamor starts again. It’s incredibly succinct. There’s open air there, brief, but enough to get a clear gulp. The rest of the song’s harsh bleat and full creepy sadness (Wash away what we create/ I hate you more I hate this place/ I know why I feel this way/ Teen creeps please don’t leave me dead, dead this way) becomes more majestic, sorrowed and pleading. That three second bit, is like a help cry, a brief moment of respite amidst a big bunch of garbage. Also, it sounds really crazy and awesome because you don’t expect it. They bring it back again at the end of the song, just a little tease. It’s not overripened because of overexposure, though, only a smidgen of extra.

A few days after I saw No Age, I saw Ladyhawk. They’re kind of a bar rock band. Sam, who I work with, went to Canada to hang out with them and write a story about them a few months ago. Part of his story included a conversation he had with them about Netflix. “Peters says he wishes they had Netflix in Canada, expressing near shock that there is actually a service that sends your movies to you.” That abject feeling of total mystification is how those three seconds of guitar sound. Can we bottle that as art? I know it’s not a happening, but it’s good old regular excitement. Isn’t that what art is about?

The day after Deitch I went to PS1 (Queens twice in a weekend!) and saw Olafur Eliasson’s exhibit. As part of that, I walked through a mist rainbow. It felt like regular mist. I can’t even say it felt good. It was kind of cold on Sunday and I didn’t really need to get vaporized like that. But I was glad I did it. It’s like when you are a kid and you realize fog is clouds and you know you just walked through a cloud. It’s fucking rad.

At the end of the AVAF my friend Soohong who works with them showed up. I asked her about the weird tile. She said they found all of that as trash and cleaned it up. Soohong is cool. She was wearing the same trench coat as my friend’s friend. Her and her boyfriend are really good at karaoke. It was cool to see her. Then I walked to a barbeque that was sort of weird. Some guy told me about how he doesn’t wash his hands very much. I left that and went dancing at a small bar. It was really hot in there so I went home. People were probably still partying in Queens. I bet they were having a better time.