Sumac – The Healer (Album Review)

Sumac, The Healer Album Review

They gave the music the same name they gave to backed-up sewage. I asked my sister if she’d heard this sludge metal stuff, although I could’ve guessed the answer. “No,” she said. “But I don’t like the sound of it.” I can’t blame her. Judging by the name, it probably sounds like a septic tank explosion in musical form. And who wants to listen to something like that? 

Certainly not my sister, whose musical sensibilities lean towards the mainstream. Billie Eilish, Gracie Abrams, Noah Kahan. Not bad choices as far as popular music goes, but still nothing to sustain me the same way it sustains her. I’ve built up too much of a tolerance after all these years of hard listening, which finally brought me to sludge metal, a genre I never thought I’d start taking seriously.

But alas, I needed some new music to seriously warp my brain. It had been at least a month or so since I’d had a real visceral reaction to anything new. I wanted the kind of music that makes you aware you’re alive. And for a neurotic like me, the unfortunate truth is that I’m most aware of my aliveness during a full-scale panic attack. Lying on the floor, taking shuddering, heaving breaths, clutching my hand to my chest, convinced I’m having a heart attack…that’s the stuff. That’s when you feel most alive—when you feel like you’re about to die.

This philosophy isn’t what the band Sumac is all about, but it’s an important factor in their music, specifically on this new record The Healer, which isn’t the most hardcore stuff out now, but has some of the best quality. I’m not talking about sound quality, since all the amps are pieces of shit (or so distorted they sound like pieces of shit) and the drums are more claustrophobic than most people might prefer. What I’m talking about is a conceptual quality.

What The Healer accomplishes over the course of 76 minutes is something most bands—metal or not—couldn’t accomplish in a career. Sure, I got what I wanted, which was some hard-to-listen-to noise to damage my brain/ears. But I got something else too: portions of genuine beauty amidst the chaos, a swath of awe in the blackness. The opening to the second track “Yellow Dawn” is like watching the sun rise over a heap of burning buildings brought down by the destructive previous track, “World of Light,” which opens the album with 26 minutes of shifting tempos and crashing instrumentals.

What begins the epic opener is the sound of Brian Cook’s bass, turned up to 11 and tearing through the silence as feedback drifts in. Nick Yacyshyn warms up his drums with some savvy free-form fills, and the listener waits in anticipation for Aaron Turner to show up with his guitar and howling vocals. Slowly, he can be heard dragging his pick across the strings, and he starts to strike a couple power chords, which is what really sets everything into motion. The music builds up by the third minute to a storm of noise, where every player seems to be doing their own song, and all at maximum speed. It breaks off into the first of many static drones.

Sumac is challenging the listener, taking their time to build up the song, daring you to turn it off before the 25 minutes are over. Even the first drone is not as pleasant as later ones, opting for screeching feedback over ambient whirs. It isn’t until six minutes in when the murk is suddenly broken by the slam of a drum line and the bowel-liquefying bray of Turner: “Silence, long held / in shuttered cities.”

You can’t understand the words unless you’ve already been initiated to sludge metal, it’s mostly just roars to me. The first clear lyric isn’t until the end of the verse, when Turner cries out “Shine!” seven times, his voice breaking the third time as the music trails off into more bone-humming mechanical drone. To usher forth the next verse, Turner begins striking his power chords again and Yacyshyn switches things up by rattling off some cymbal lines, after originally opting for the snare and hi-hats.

Two noisy verses later, halfway through the track, Turner offers up a moment of clarity with a slow guitar solo as Earthly ambience tumbles through the track: wind, running water, the hooting of owls. As the sounds fade out, the guitar solo persists, and everything turns eerie as tape machines start to squeak and whir. The tapes are being handled by long-time Sumac collaborator Faith Coloccia.

The song ends with a total clusterfuck of noise which crashes into the next track, “Yellow Dawn.” As I said before, this track is the calm after the storm of “World of Light.” Coloccia returns, playing the organ in the opening, which is one of my favorite sections of the album. This incredible song also yields some of the most intense sounds off the whole record later into its 12 minute runtime. At once, Yacyshyn starts to drum so quickly it’s unbelievable, while Cook’s bass riff starts to pick up and turn muddier. The shriek of amplifiers and snares is only broken by Turner’s guitar, which assumes the quality of a lighthouse in the chaos before the track hurtles towards its end.

“New Rites” is the jazziest of the arrangements, which is a term I use liberally, not referring to the brass or woodwind instruments used in free jazz, but rather the pastoral lulls and instrumental improvisation. This track is by no means boring, but certainly the least interesting of the four on the album, which is good to prepare you for the closer, “The Stone’s Turn.”

It’s another 20 plus minute epic, just like the opener. It starts with a muddy riff on Turner’s guitar that continues into the first verse, which delivers some of Turner’s most upsetting lyricism as he cries: “Through two hearts, a spear / The worm’s howl / echoes through the years / Gorged upon / our spirits.” 

The music takes on a faster tempo and Turner howls and cries like a wounded dog. It’s easy to dismiss all the throat-busting cries as just part of the music, and forget about the lyrics. Still a great album. But you’d be missing out on the point of it all. Pay attention to his voice and understand that primal humanity may be the driving force behind his bawls, but there is something more to express, which is the parallel events of creation and destruction.

The constant shifts in tone and mood are meant to reflect the sides of this coin, and although the lyrics never tell a full story, they follow the themes of creation and destruction, describing both the splendors of heaven and earth (“Yellow Dawn”) and landscapes pocked with bodies (“World of Light”). Returning to the final track, one line that stuck out was “By swallowed tears / the stone now dissolved.”

I’m still not exactly sure what “the stone” refers to, but my theory is that Turner is referring to Earth, and that this final track is the sound of apocalypse, just as the first track was the sound of creation. “The Stone’s Turn” ends with a twisted symphony of noise which collapses into loud static, then cutting off to total silence just a few seconds before the end of the album, leaving you with a pounding heart and sore ears.

That’s the stuff.

Score/Outstanding: A feat in instrumentalism and conceptualism.

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