No, White Noise was made to express the condition of being young and bored and sick to death of the daily parade of assholes across one’s field of vision in a Southern California high school in the late 1980s. Its subjects (such as “Highway 71,” in a song that remakes the famed “Route 66” into a travelogue of uninteresting high desert locales) are often regionally quite specific, and the cadences and tone in which its lyrics are delivered practically scream “I’m looking at a palm tree right now.” It is audibly a faithful chronicle of a time and a person and a place, and a carefully constructed chronicle, too, with a view toward its own eventual status as historical document. It has a higher hit-to-miss ratio than most records I’ve heard this year, and songs like “Beautiful Burnout” and especially “Fingerprints” (“I drive my mom’s car, it’s an automatic/when my real band plays, I sometimes feel ecstatic/people say my music is nothing but static/my friend Brian’s girlfriend is real charismatic”) quietly emit the particularly Californian eau du snotty that has made the state’s natives objects of equal parts envy and scorn for much of the country. For an expat Californian like myself, it’s like stepping through time into a landscape in which a less romantic version of Fast Times at Ridgemont High might have taken place, one where the punk doesn’t get to go to the prom with the cute popular girl and one-up the letter-jacketed pricks after all: he skips the prom altogether, because he’s always thought proms were for lemmings who don’t have anything better to do on a Friday night than put on rented tuxedos and pay good money to listen to shitty cover bands playing “Girls on Film,” and he stays home and listens to New Order’s Movement.