Less than a year on from ‘The Healer’, Sumac return with ‘The Film’, recorded in what they refer to as a ‘nebulaic’ collaboration with ‘the visionary award-winning avant-jazz poet, scholar, activist, and punk rocker Moor Mother’. They set the scene thus: ‘Heavy, holy, hypnotizing – beyond existence, beyond the fettered constraints of normality, past the false notions of the indoctrinated disguised as the organic, planets form; the detritus of cosmic stuff merges into galaxies, into something that can sound like it’s populated by suns. The Film is just such a work…’
In comparison to its predecessor, where the shortest of the four tracks was thirteen minutes in duration, the eight compositions on The Film are comparatively succinct, with only a couple extending beyond the ten-minute mark, with a couple of brief minute-long interludes.
The album is structured like a film, or a play, and ‘Scene 1’ sets the scene with some scratching, droning guitar wish crashes in shredding waves of distortion creating a tense backdrop for the passionate, hyped-up spoken word interplay, before ‘Scene 2: The Run’ crashes in. it’s dark, it’s dense, it’s atmospheric. Around four minutes in, a crunching bass grind reminiscent of early Swans enters the mix. Aaron Turner depicts a fast-moving scene of high-anxiety. It slows to a crunching wheeze around eight minutes in, before once again picking up the pace, and from nowhere explodes into a wall of solid metal sound. It sounds more like the soundtrack to a brutal assault than anything else. ‘Scene 4’ is sparse but heavy, and this is a fair summary of the album as a whole. Things seems to start coming apart on ‘Camera’ and the seventeen-minute closer, ‘Breathing Fire’ is a crushing dirge, again calling to mind Swand circa 1984 in musical terms, the bass standing out as being absolutely punishing, while the rappy spoken word brings a bleakness that has no small impact.
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‘The Film’ is a concept album in the truest sense, devised as a narrative work rather than a collection of songs. The tread of continuity may not always be immediately apparent, but that seems beside the point: ‘The Film’ leads the listener on a journey that’s emotionally and sonically challenging, and no visuals could ever match up to this soundtrack.
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