Noxagt |
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There’s not much that is more annoying when it comes to writing reviews than listening to an underground album all week in preparation to write about it, and then Pitchfork comes along and reviews it a day earlier, making you look like just another slave to them. Still, I didn’t read the Pitchfork review of Noxagt. I simply looked at the rating like I always do, and then got out of there as quickly as possible before my eyeballs decide to throw themselves at a spike. Anyway, in fairness The Iron Point is worthy of some international coverage because it’s an essential lesson in aural brutality, and sometimes it just never fails to amaze me how capable some musicians are of making such uncivilized sounds from minimal equipment.
These Norwegians come at the game with only drums, bass, and viola - potentially the perfect ingredients for delicate ambient music. But no, with the bass distorted beyond recognition, the viola manipulated until it sounds alien, and thumping drums with slicing cymbals cutting through the speakers, Noxagt produce what is more akin to endurance music, and when they nail that riff, it doesn’t leave so easily. Sometimes it doesn’t leave at all.
You can visualize the skin being scraped slowly away from the fingers by those coarse metallic bass strings. It sounds as painful to play as it does to listen to, but only in a rewarding way, sickly enough. If you’ve ever sat on your own playing an out-of-time riff hypnotically, over and over, it becomes almost a challenge to see how long you can maintain the rhythm and notes without polluting it. This is what Noxagt makes me think of, yet despite that repetition, there is still so much happening. There’s the constant risk of another brutal segment being thrown into the mix, and in particular you can always rely on the viola and drums to keep the sounds fresh. On ‘Thurmaston’ they even succeed in making the viola sound like a chainsaw while the pounding beats are an entire forest collapsing.
Yes, The Iron Point is completely unconventional, and probably too much for the average person to handle. Swinging from mesmeric to terrifying, it’s fortunate that the album lasts only 34 minutes. You can almost relax during ‘Kling No Klokka’ – the only song to feature vocals, although they do belong to the grandfather of Nils Erga (viola), but when ‘Svartevatn’ follows, the brutality trebles. Then when ‘Regions of May’ finally brings the abuse to an end, it’s almost majestic. Confusingly, it reminds me of Deacon Blue’s ‘Loaded’ while your head is trapped between two sheets of iron, but it feels like a gift for making it this far into the album. A gift I am grateful for, and I walk away proudly knowing my ears have a noise threshold way beyond the norm.
Steven McCarron
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