"You don't skip your chance to make a double album if you have it," says Scott Taylor, guitarist and lead singer for Portland, Ore.-based group, No Go Know, who have indeed just released a double album. Though it is a symbol of overblown rock 'n' roll excess from the '70s - the sign of egos fueled by coke that punk hoped to stab through its drum solo-choked heart - for No Go Know, however, Time Has Nothing to Do with It is their best album yet, and it just may be their breakthrough.

Recently, high-profile bands like Radiohead and Okkervil River have had the material to release double albums, but backed away from the idea. "I'm glad those albums (Kid A/Amnesiac and The Stage Names/The Stand Ins, respectively) are single albums, personally," says Taylor. "But at the same time, if the material is there and you feel like it's thematically threaded together, why break it up? I realize it's a lot of music and probably too much for one sitting - but that's why there are two discs. I don't expect anyone to listen to both albums back-to-back, Lord knows I don't do that with the double albums I own, but we had a large number of songs that we felt were strong enough to warrant being released. Sure, it's over the top, but so is our music and rock 'n' roll in general. Why not celebrate that? Plus, lyrically I had a hard time separating the songs from each other."

No Go Know is from Portland, but its roots lie in Vermont. The band, in fact, has a close relationship with Vermont's own Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, a group about as traditional and roots-based as No Go Know is experimental. Taylor has been a confidant of Nocturnals' guitarist Scott Tournet since they met at Goddard College in 1999. In 2004, Taylor recruited Tournet's band to help record an album as User Shorty Patent Company. For the recording of their wildly spacey album, Depart So Slow, Grace Potter started her relationship with the Hammond B3 organ, which has now become an instrument she is heavily identified with. It was also one of the first times the Nocturnals got to rock out. "With User Shorty, I was in my first bona fide rock 'n' roll band," says Nocturnals drummer Matt Burr. After having the Nocturnals play with him around town, Taylor was able to put together a band of his own with Mark McIntire on bass. In 2005, User Shorty was retired as Taylor decided to move to Portland to play with his friend Sam Smith, who had played drums with Taylor in earlier bands. McIntire moved to Portland also, and No Go Know was formed.

Their eponymous debut album was recorded in Taylor and Smith's basement, live with no overdubs, as was Depart So Slow (Neil Young is a big influence on these guys, in methods and in sound). The album shows No Go Know's complexity was there from the start. In that basement in Portland, they created a new way of reaching the big-rock peak. Songs shift tempos suddenly, rhythms are complex and sometimes inspired by African music (their name comes from a Fela Kuti song), and they eschew typical rock chord progressions. There are a lot of guitar solos, sure (nothing wrong with that), but they are very unconventional. Instead of emphasizing dexterity and speed, Scott Taylor's guitar playing blends classic rock riffs, Wilco-esque experimentation and washes of sound. "I think that comes from me not being a very good guitarist or at least not a very confident guitarist," Taylor says. "This is the first band that I've been 'allowed' to solo in. At the same time, because we're a three-piece, I need to find ways to solo that don't allow for too much volume/energy drop. I don't have time or space to noodle around - I've got to go right for the neck each time, hence the abundance of uni-bends and generally noisy guitar playing."

No Go Know's material develops organically among the three members. "Most of the songs have come from Scott bringing in an idea - a set of chords, or a few riffs, or sometimes a whole song structure," says Sam Smith, "which we then play around with as a band and flesh out, oftentimes doing a lot of rearranging, trying it a bunch of different ways until we really like it. Other songs will sort of come out of practice sessions, out of some jam or riff that someone happens to play and we'll just come up with different parts as we go."

When the time came to plan out the new album, Taylor sat at a bar and wrote out the songs that were ready to be recorded on a napkin and realized they had enough for a double album. "At first it was kind of funny," says Smith, "but then it was like, 'Well, why not?' There was definitely a point where I had to question whether or not it was the right move, and I actually came up with a sequence for a single album to see if it would work, because I didn't want to put out a double album simply because we liked the idea of putting out a double album. I wanted it to be because we considered all the options and felt like it was the best one. We put a lot of time into trying to make the discs balanced, and to achieve a sense of consistency throughout, and if I didn't feel that it had that balance and consistency, I definitely would have pushed for the single disc."

"A lot of double albums are a bit bulky and overblown, but that's the nature of the double album," says Taylor. "We embraced that and went for it."

Time Has Nothing to Do with It currently stands as No Go Know's four-minute mile, an achievement that will be hard to surpass and a standard by which other bands can measure their work. It takes a lot of confidence to put a song like "My Black Dog" second on your double album. The track is one chord, over and over, a brief chorus and a feedback breakdown in the middle. But it's catchy as hell. "Our Bodies Will Float," a gorgeous song that features amazing harmony parts from McIntire, shows a new flair for tension and restraint for the band ("We're getting better at that," says Taylor).

As for how the songs are connected thematically, the album deals with endings - endings of relationships and endings of civilizations (inspired by Taylor's life and Derrick Jensen's Endgame, a book about humans' destruction of the Earth). "There's a lot of images that carry over from song to song and a lot of self-referencing," Taylor says. "Personally, I dig that kind of thing in the work of people like Neil Young and Jason Molina [who goes by Songs: Ohia]. Once I realized we were making a double album, I ran with it - though I'm not so sure it's translated to anyone who doesn't live inside my brain. I was having a lot of nightmares and not sleeping well in the months that this album was incubating, so dreams and the seasons themselves were highly influential." It's a heavy ride and one full of questions without absolutes. Musically, all the parts fit - the jamming and the structure, the Built to Spill sectional songwriting and Crazy Horse simplicity, the focus on melody and emphasis on rhythm, the bigness, the heart and the post-millennial, eco-apocalypse existential blues.

And as for those peaks, Taylor says, "We all-too-often go right for the huge peak instead of letting it arrive a little more naturally. And that's not necessarily a bad thing - it's just that we all get excited about what's happening with the music and where it's going. Perhaps we should play with robots."