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Review: 'Noxagt'
'Brutage / Collection 1'   

-  Album: 'Brutage / Collection 1' -  Label: 'Drid Machine'
-  Genre: 'Rock' -  Release Date: '15th March 2014'-  Catalogue No: 'DMR5 / DMR15'

Our Rating:
The first track, ‘...’ is but a minute-long fade-in, a mere taster of what’s to come. And then it hits. ‘It’ is ‘You Were Followed By a Man From the Station to Your House’. The blunt, bludgeoning sound of early Swans is perhaps the most obvious reference point for the way Noxagt hammer away at a single, two-chord wall of concrete with industrial force. This is the sound of anger, defeatism, nihilism in extremis. The noise and the violence builds, the percussion grows heavier, wilder, more frantic, but it’s still the same crushing grind that crawls around it. Howling feedback and a jet engine roar, a barrage of percussion like thunder sufficient to split even the toughest of skulls goes beyond music, beyond endurance. If the gentle cymbal washes that occupy the first few seconds of ‘Someone Calls You Every Night But Says Nothing. You Can’t Skeep’ suggest respite, you’d be mistaken as the sledgehammer blows resume. The narrative, as played out through the titles, continues. The relentless, monotonous, trudging repetition is unyielding, unforgiving. Blasts of noise explode on noise to punishing effect. ‘A Colleague Came to Your House and Punched You. Your Room Became Very Messy’ is monstrously oppressive, dark and cheerless, and almost 11 minutes in duration, and the final track, ‘A Drunken Person Kicked You at the Station and You Had to Go to Hospital’ is a swampy slice of slithering gloom; it may not be as pulverising, but it’s no less weighty and if ever an album was worthy of its title, ‘Brutage’ is it.

‘Collection 1’ gathers a slew of unreleased material recorded between 2001 and 2004 by the only Norwegian band ever to record a session of John Peel (apparently). It’s easy to discern why Peel would have picked them. The album explodes with the sonic equivalent of a nuclear bomb and doesn’t get much lighter thereafter. A bass-heavy trudge with lacerating guitar squalls defines the sound of the live cuts, while ‘Titanic’, culled from that Peel session, is a stoner sludge workout worthy of Melvins (and it’s perhaps worth noting that their album ‘Turning It Down Since 2001’ was produced by Billy Anderson, who’s worked with both Swans and Melvins, and who contributes vocals on ‘Acasta Gneiss’). Hints of free jazz and Eastern promise strain on ‘Abdel-Wahab’ before thunderous bass obliterates everything in its wake. ‘Gravy & Blood’, a live outtake from 2002 is another Swans-like dirge of monumental force, while the live radio broadcast of ‘Piranha’ from 2001 is a nasty mess of feedback and noise.

Individually, these are intensely heavyweight and monumentally powerful sonic documents. Taken together, they’re almost beyond words.

Brutage Online at Drid Machine Records
  author: Christopher Nosnibor

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Noxagt - Brutage / Collection 1
Brutage
Noxagt - Brutage / Collection 1
Collection 1