For a band with no shortage of trapped-animal screams, Exoterm stay remarkably lucid. Though fierce improv abounds, cacophony never arrives. Guitarist Nels Cline is this debuting US-Norwegian quartet's star name, especially outside jazz after helping to make Wilco a great rock live band. Bassist Rune Nergaard and his sax compadre Kristoffer Berre Alberts are, though, its Norwegian core. Nergaard's writing – ranging from sketches to tunes – is each track's seed. It leaves room for Berre Alberts' lyrical bop urbanity on opener ‘First Light’, and the lovely spiritual jazz of 90-second interlude ‘Moves Away from the Door’, a rare moment of unison which slurs from New Orleans to the Orient. The album is dominated by a sense of sonic attack, from the fractured funk chase scene of ‘…Back Towards the Car – Night’ to the bestial feedback buzz of ‘Two More Times’. Shards of sound sometimes seem to interrelate in alien ways, as during the fragmented, furious sonic emissions of ‘Forest Mist – Night’. Berre Alberts' manic free blitz in the concluding prog epic ‘Manufacturing a Smile (Exits Into A Corridor)’ blazes over Cline's slow-motion blues, yet somehow coheres. Berre Alberts and Nergaard's co-production, and their Norwegian team's mixing and mastering, is unusually important to all of this. Though their sound seems maxed-out, it retains powerful organic clarity. ‘Two More Times’ can therefore contain both Cline's crystalline clang and drummer Jim Black's doomy thoom, phantom, spiralling melodies and clawing feedback. Volume and musicality are both unrelenting.