Neuguitars 2024 #23: “The Healer” by Sumac, an example of evolutionary post-metal
Surrender to the metal.
The Healer | SUMAC (bandcamp.com)
In 1995, in the magazine “Village Voice”, the music critic Simon Reynolds published an essay entitled “Post-Rock” where the foundations of this new musical genre were defined: “Post-rock means bands that use guitars but in nonrock ways, as timbre and texture rather than riff and powerchord. It also means bands that augment rock's basic-bass -drums lineup with digital technology such as samplers and sequencers, or tamper with the trad rock lineup but prefer antiquated analog synths and nonrock instrumentation. With its droneswarm guitars and tendency to melt into ambience, post-rock first erodes, then obliterates the song and the voice.”
Audio Culture Readings in Modern Music, pag. 358
These words come back to me almost thirty years later, listening to "The Healer", the fifth album, the latest effort by SUMAC, a powerful metal trio formed by Aaron Turner (Isis, Old Man Gloom, Mamiffer), Nick Yacyshyn ( Baptists) and Brian Cook (Russian Circles, These Arms Are Snakes). It's their first album that I buy and listen to and I was pleasantly surprised by it.
SUMAC seems like a post-rock version of classic metal bands, where their sprawling style, carefully calculated and semi-improvised at the same time, strongly recalls the ideas of Simon Reynolds, showing an interesting evolutionary line in metal themes.
Regardless of the song form, with an album 76 minutes long and with only four tracks (World of Light, Yellow Dawn, New Rites and The Stone's Turn), which take the form of real suites in length and structure, SUMAC alternates with an efficient balancing of long waves of powerful drones with recursive exercises of chaos and control, managed with a careful and constant process of expansion, contraction, corruption and regrowth.
“The Healer” requires careful and difficult listening, in which you need to let yourself go to the slow heaviness of the guitar feedbacks, accompanied by the cavernous depths reached by Aaron Turner's voice. “The Healer” is a “post” album in which the band not only invests all its experience, but also the vast range of metal subgenres, adding stylistic references to an already complex work. There is something exciting in a work that should, in theory, be rather boring and monotonous, but which in reality proves to be the exact opposite, proving to be an enjoyable sensorial and cerebral experience, thanks to the obsessive care that SUMAC dedicates to every detail and the continuous creation of intertwined dynamics, dynamics often hidden in the plots of a pure alienating impact.
It's no coincidence, in the end, that these metal veterans were produced by Thrill Jockey. Surrender to the metal.