In a world without Sonic Youth, No Age [ tickets ] would be much harder to explain, let alone embrace. The LA duo-- drummer/vocalist Dean Spunt and guitarist Randy Randall--finds the edge in its music between utter confusion and breathtaking beauty and skates down the center. Swirling eddies of noise and confusion appear from thin air and are replaced just as mysteriously by perfect melody, but nothing lasts forever, no matter how fat and tempting the hook. "Nouns," the band's 28-minute sophomore album from last year, contained a 68-page booklet that framed the band as sort of an art-school project in progress, but the album's lead single, "Eraser," with its Spectoresque Wall of Sound integrated with, variously, an atonal droning hum and Spunt's matter-of-fact vocals, does all the talking the band needs in a brisk 2 minutes, 41 seconds.

Performing Thursday, March 19 at 8 p.m. at Radio Room Patio (508 E 6th St.)

website: http://www.myspace.com/nonoage