Hello there. The beat is all acoustic drums. Each drum sound is likely run through a compressor to keep its volume fairly constant, and is EQ’d individually at least a little. They are also all panned only slightly. I think the compactness imparted by the combination of panning and compression add to the “chewiness”. Plus, Nigel’s analog rack compressors are inherently going to accentuate some nice frequencies.
The main “effect” on the whole beat is a lowpass filter, with the resonance set fairly low. We first hear evidence of this at 0:15 they close the filter halfway for just a split second, and realize that the initial beat sound was filtered at ~0:19 when open it up to let in more of the high frequencies.
They also close the filter quite a bit at 1:09-1:12, as you note, and at a few other key points. I bet they used the Mutronics Mutator for this, using it as a simple low-pass filter (so with the LFO and Envelope turned off).
It also sounds like certain mid frequencies were accented throughout the track. This probably wasn’t done with a band pass filter, since that would lose too much of the highs and lows. More likely it’s either a standard EQ being adjusted quite a lot, or a Parametric EQ with the peak frequency being adjusted while the small boost amount (~2dB) is kept fairly constant.
In response to the Max question:
The looping of a small fragment of audio (as heard at 1:12-1:16 or 2:45) is definitely something that Jonny uses Max for (see: stutter patch). However, Jonny’s patch is fairly unpredictable, I don’t think it was used for these precise vocal manipulations. More likely, this manipulation was done in a DAW. Nigel and Thom mainly use Pro Tools, so that would be my guess. Also, note that these loops are layered over the dry vocals (unless the reverb is deceiving me).