<a href="http://dridmachinerecords.bandcamp.com/album/noxagt-brutage" data-mce-href="http://dridmachinerecords.bandcamp.com/album/noxagt-brutage">NOXAGT: Brutage by Drid Machine</a>
Norway's Noxagt are a power trio in the purest sense of the term; however else their music has changed, or they have, they remain committed to figuring out just how heavy their particular kind of instrumental music can get. When they started releasing records that meant Kjetil Brandsdal’s bass and Jan Christian Kyvik’s drums were augmented by Nils Erga’s viola on 2003’s Turning it Down Since 2001 (the year Brandsdal began Noxagt as a solo project) and 2004’s The Iron Point; between those records and their last released through Load Records, 2006’s self-titled album, Erga and his very distinctive sound were replaced by Anders Hana on baritone guitar.
Out of all their records, that still commendable effort is the only one where the band didn’t quite seem to know how to go for the jugular; Erga’s sawing, blaring viola had been such a prominent part of what made Noxagt’s early work so great (especially the debut, maybe the best metal record made with strings as a part of the main band until recent SubRosa records) that switching to a more conventional set up resulted in something that felt a lot harder to pick out of a lineup.
In 2008 Hana was replaced with John Hegra on guitar, but the even more standard power-trio instrumentation and six-year wait for Brutage doesn’t mean that this record is more conventional than past work; if anything it’s the band’s most extreme work to date. Some of the best songs on Turning it Down, like “Mek it Burn,” “Cupid Shot Me” and “Swarm,” were vicious, short shocks, doing their damage and then immediately taking off. On Brutage (literally “more rough” in French), Noxagt have instead constructed a kind of riffductio ad absurdum, hammering away at their instruments and the listener as if trying their hardest to embody the proverbial hammer for which everything is a nail.
After “…”’s brief introduction, sounding like Noxagt is practicing their start-stopping on a truck which is slowly bearing down on the audience, “YOU WERE FOLLOWED BY A MAN FROM THE STATION TO YOUR HOUSE.” (yes, all the titles are like that) takes a good 10 minutes to work over its hammering, relentless theme.
On first listen, it can feel like these songs are monomaniacal to the point of distraction, but once you’ve played it enough that the sheer performative intensity of the songs is no longer overwhelming, it’s possible to admire how sleekly and naturally the song moves from theme to theme. “SOMEONE CALLS YOU EVERY NIGHT BUT SAYS NOTHING. YOU CAN’T SLEEP.” makes immediately clear how relatively varied and reasonable the preceding track is, because it really does just try and batter the same riff into your head for nine minutes. It’s like a less hyper cousin to Shooting Guns’ equally gobsmacking “Motherfuckers Never Learn” from last year’s peerless Brotherhood of the Ram, but where the Canadian band folds in elements from space rock and heavy psych, Noxagt have the scraping relentlessness of pure noise.
Aside from that intro there are only four tracks, all four equal in impact, but after the record’s first half Noxagt relaxes their grip to allow just a bit of breathing room. “A COLLEAGUE CAME TO YOUR HOUSE AND PUNCHED YOU. YOUR ROOM BECAME VERY MESSY.” begins by having Brandsdal and Kyvik grind away while Hegra slowly coaxes plangent feedback out of his guitar, and the contrast of stasis and constant circular motion gives the track an added sense of tension. Just when it seems like the band is going to allow the dread implicit in the song’s structure to loom closer and closer for all 11 minutes without actually arriving, the feedback starts layering and sliding and the entire track takes a very slow elevator to hell.
The eight minutes of “A DRUNKEN PERSON KICKED YOU AT THE STATION AND YOU HAD TO GO TO THE HOSPITAL.” is basically cleanup/aftermath, stuttering white noise and a blown-out haunted carousel kind of loop cycling throughout; if you’re listening to Brutage on headphones, it makes for a wonderful decompression chamber.
You need that gentle reintroduction into life, because Brutage can absolutely absorb the rest of the world when played at specific volume. The densely packed melodic nuggets of Noxagt’s early work are nowhere to be found here. They've been replaced by a commitment to wringing every last drop of potential out of each refrain and crescendo the band hits. In a body of work seemingly devoted to exploring the myriad ways a band can be heavy, this might be the heaviest thing Noxagt has ever done. Listeners not accustomed to the pursuit of transcendence through brutality may regard it as anti-music, but fellow travellers will find Brutage to be outright intoxicating.
