by Benji Heywood (@benjiheywood)
Ask Aaron Turner and he’ll tell you he wants the music of SUMAC, his experimental metal band with bassist Brian Cook and drummer Nick Yacyshyn, to be a reflection of the band members’ lived experience. If we take that assertion at face value, what does The Healer, the band’s fifth album out now on Thrill Jockey, say about the experience of living in today’s Western world?
First, let’s get the superlatives out of the way. The Healer is our Album of the Week but calling it an “album” feels like an undersell. The scope and grandeur of The Healer begs comparison to an epic novel or a film auteur’s masterpiece making it impossible to distill its essence into one catchy tagline. Which is the point. At 76 minutes, The Healer is oceanic, a leviathan of tones, tempos, and motifs which run the gamut of improvisational noise, bone-humming sludge, meditative pastorals, and some straight-up abacus-defying, heart-palpitating riffs.
SUMAC has always demanded a concerted effort on the part of the listener. It’s a fair ask. From its album artwork to its penchant for collaboration, everything SUMAC does is performed with painstaking care. For those who take the time, The Healer is the Pacific Northwest band’s most beguiling and rewarding album of its decade-plus career.
“World of Light,” the album’s 26-minute opener, begins with Cook’s overdriven bass reverberating in the room. Turn the volume up loud enough and you can feel it in your chest. Yacyshyn enters next, touring different toms, the snare, a splashy hi-hat. Turner’s pick then scrapes across an aluminum-necked guitar before dissolving into undulating feedback. It’s the beginning of a twisted symphony in which the orchestra tunes itself to noise.
SUMAC is in no hurry. Anticipation builds. Finally, at the six-minute mark, Turner’s iconic howl enters, a hellhound bray that veers at times into dragon-screech. The lyrics may be indecipherable, but whatever he’s screaming serves as an introduction to the album’s mood, like the spoken word that begins of F♯ A♯ ∞. After another lengthy noise improvisation, SUMAC sludges into focus like a continental shelf sliding toward the sea. The section is simple in its construction, its distinct change evoking a yearning, almost hopeful feeling.
The movement extinguishes itself with a collective intake of breath. The guitar re-enters with an improvisational section fit for the Bang Bang Bar at closing time. Tape loops, performed by regular SUMAC contributor Faith Coloccia, join cymbal swells, lending an eerie vibe to a movement that’s both beautiful and unnerving.
“World of Light” concludes with a section that sounds as if the band somehow threw their gear—amps, drums and all—down a flight of stairs. The final minutes provide a glimpse of classic SUMAC: double kick fueled riffs interspliced with guitar breaks of disparate lengths. It takes almost half an hour, but when SUMAC arrive, it’s unmistakable.
As the track released to streamers before the album, “Yellow Dawn” might be the most accessible SUMAC song since “Image of Control I & II.” If you’re here for head-banging riffs juxtaposed by fleeting beauty, then “Yellow Dawn” is your jam.
In its opening movement, the band playfully navigates its way through an organ-laden suite. Yacyshyn uses mallets as he follows Cook’s quintuple-metered bassline, Turner’s guitar meandering atop like a creek through a glen. It’s the first of several sections in which “Yellow Dawn” shines. The song showcases many of the album’s best moments, including an instrumental mid-section that absolutely fucks. Over a bass riff that alternates between fuzzed-out wah-wah and straight-up distorted menace, Turner’s guitar solo is exuberantly maximal. Yacyshyn’s marsupial-sized pocket somehow makes a riff in five feel like a four-on-the-floor head bobber.
It cannot be overstated how much the production of Scott Evans—crisp, pristine, and precisely EQ-ed—contributes to how effective “Yellow Dawn” is. Each instrument exists in its own aural field without sacrificing any of the band’s live chemistry. The Healer sounds at once spontaneous and impeccably produced—a rare feat accomplished by a producer at the top of his game.
There’s a particular tone of feedback indigenous to SUMAC. For guitar players, imagine muting the strings on the harmonic seventh fret, but with the guitar tuned to “spazz.” The intro section of “New Rites” has this sound in abundance. For the life of me, I can’t count what is happening in this movement. Is the band telepathic? There’s no other explanation.
The band breaks into a mid-tempo groove. It feels like a trap. This is too approachable for musicians of this pedigree; there’s not a time signature in existence they haven’t played in. But no, this satisfying groove trucks along, occasionally interrupted by a mind-bending drum fill. It reminds me that defying expectation is SUMAC’s calling card.
The third movement of “New Rights” is a relentless pummeling that continues at break-neck pace before devolving into a tornado of noise. The music that emerges from the devastation is unlike anything ever heard from SUMAC—mournful, elegiac, almost worshipful. Here, Turner’s forlorn scream sounds painfully lonely, as if it's given in tribute to a lost love or fallen god.
When I was a kid, TV stations signed off around 2AM and the signal was replaced with static. Now imagine adding to that the sound of someone being burned alive. That’s what the first two and half minutes of “The Stone’s Turn” remind me of.
In many ways, “The Stone’s Turn” is the dangerous doppelganger of “World of Light.” Where the opening movement of the latter is patient, “The Stone’s Turn” is brutal. Turner’s got a lot to say—or scream, as it may be—and he does so in emphatic fashion, ending the song’s first movement with the album’s most pronounced statement: “Your god is a worm!” The second movement jump cuts between musical chaos and bowel-liquifying yowls before resolving into the song’s first true groove. The section doesn’t last, quickly transitioning to an improvisation almost black metal in its speed and fury.
The song’s mid-section slows tempo-wise, but the energy doesn’t lapse. Against a steadily churning backdrop, Turner’s blood-scrambling guitar solo careens from melody to pure noise and back again. When his voice replaces the solo as the song’s focal point, the emotionality of the white-noise wash ceding space to a throat-busting yell is so nakedly human, it gives chills.
Throughout The Healer, SUMAC demonstrates an unexpected frailty. Nowhere is that more evident than album’s final improvisation that leads to its explosive climax. Listening to this section feels like clinging to a cliff by your fingernails during a rockslide. All around you falls a flurry of drums, bass, and guitar as you hang on for dear life. The Healer concludes with a demented blues section. I’m not going to even try to explain what happens here, you’ll just have to listen. Suffice it to say, it’s my favorite part on the album, a satisfying conclusion to a musical odyssey.
A hour and fifteen minutes later we return to the initial question: if The Healer represents the scope of human experience, what can we ascertain about it? The album features moments of knee-shaking terror, of triumph and adulation, of peace and serenity, of confusion and chaos, of unmistakable sublimity. The Healer says to me: Life is fragile and all emotions are temporary. Patience is required. Human relationships are to be prized above convenience. Enjoy any unexpected bliss but beware the cost. No one’s making it out of this alive. Your mileage may vary, but ultimately that’s what makes SUMAC a band worth your time.