You know how they say that opinions are like assholes (because everybody has one)? It turns out that, particularly for music reviewers, genre tags are like assholes after too much spicy food: overused and not very helpful to anyone else. Natt is a new band from Norway whose self-titled debut album illustrates both the insufficiency of genre labels and the joys to be found in simply walking into the world without trying to make sense of it first.
Natt plays longform, meditative music that is heavy without being heavy metal, intricate without feeling bogged down in complexity, and progresses without quite being “progressive.” The band’s core is the songwriting duo of Roy Ole Førland and René Misje, both of whom perform on synthesizers, alongside Misje’s kitchen sink of piano, guitar, bass, and other instrumentation. They are joined on the album by Lord Bård on bass and Enslaved’s Iver Sandøy on drums and percussion.
By complete coincidence, early in the day on which I first listened to this album, I had been listening to the Cure’s Disintegration on a new (and quite bass-heavy) portable speaker. As always, Disintegration’s opening track “Plainsong” rattled my teeth before bathing them in honeyed sadness, but it also unwittingly primed me to hear Natt’s instrumental music from a similar vantage point. As with “Plainsong,” Natt’s opener “Skillevei” starts with a melancholy downbeat of thick synth swells and plaintive processed guitar, although it gradually opens out into more spacious post-rock textures. By the time the song rolls to its final minutes, it has whipped up an interlocking series of tremolo patterns and patient yet evocative drumming that keeps the cosmic atmosphere still tethered to earth.
“Appell” begins on an even more restrained note, with clean, pizzicato-style riffing that moves in and out of deceptively mathy time signatures (the very opening section, for example, is in a slippery 11/8 meter). The song eventually settles into a thoroughly hypnotic, head-nodding groove, but Sandøy’s tastefully busy drumming keeps everything afloat with a current of kinetic mutation. “Appell” is a wonderful meeting point of the chiming post-metal of a band like Red Sparowes and the heavy, krautrock-influenced synth of Zombi.
The entire B-side of the album is taken up by “Etterslått,” which works a glacially slow build from several minutes of distant, low drone. It’s an overwhelmingly sparse, haunted song that uses its 20-minute time to build suspense with an almost claustrophobic quiet that echoes the noir elements of Bohren & der Club of Gore or Ulver’s Drone Activity. Even when the drums ramp up the volume around the 9-minute mark, the band leans so far back on the beat that they almost move in reverse. When the song hits a massive downbeat at the 15-minute mark, it surges with a huge, wooly riff that sounds a little like Candlemass trying their hand at funeral doom. In its length, languid pace, and psychedelic textures, it is likely little accident that the song recalls Pink Floyd’s sidelong “Echoes.”
Natt is easy to get lost in. It never moves too quickly, never transitions abruptly, never overplays its hand. That smoothness and self-assuredness, however, does not feel like stasis or lack of ambition. This excellent album is inviting, thoughtful, engrossing, and ultimately open-ended. Without vocals or lyrics, the sumptuous atmospheres are left to paint whatever imagery the listener chooses to hang her interpretation on; rudimentary Google Translate offers the song titles in English as “Crossroads,” “Appeal,” “Left Behind.” If you walk with Natt, I do not know where you will find yourself, but I know that they will find something in you.
