This is the fifth album from Canadian post-metal/sludge band Sumac, (who boast current and ex-members of bands such as Baptists, Genghis Tron, Isis, Old Man Gloom, Russian Circles, and These Arms Are Snakes in their ranks).
It’s been a while since I caught up with Sumac – 2018’s collaboration with Keijo Haino in fact, as well as their full length from the same year, Love in Shadow. I even had the privilege of catching them live in 2019. Apparently they also had an album out in 2020 called May You Be Held, which I somehow completely missed, which is a shame. All of which brings us to the immense 76 minutes of material on The Healer.
The Healer is complex and engrossing. It consists of four lengthy tracks that allow Sumac to explore their musical landscape with care and curiosity. It’s massively heavy in places, but also intricate, eloquent, and atmospheric. It’s threaded with emotion, while also embracing the freeform nature of improvisation, which allows the band to create music that feels organic and expressive, without always deliberately trying to convey a particular mood or feeling.
The songs explore everything from the elemental base properties of heavy music, reducing them to their constituent parts and drawing them out to fully examine their worth, to the soaring heights to the ethereal heavens, with ambient textures and resplendent sounds gifting the music transcendent properties that Sumac mine for new pathways to then dive into. It’s labyrinthine and intricate, yet also unforced and natural. The Healer is a paradox of raw unfettered emotion and sophistication, yet walks these two worlds freely and without complication.
Sludge, doom, drone, post-metal, psychedelia, jazz, experimental, whatever – these genre tags can all be used to describe The Healer, yet also don’t really capture the atypical fusion that frequently happens across the songs. Sumac’s ability to blend well-considered composition with improvised sounds and textures is impressive; rather than sound disjointed or amateurish, it actually comes off as quite the opposite. Having said that, it’s important to note that The Healer is not for the uninitiated. It’s more Khanate than Isis, although you can certainly hear the lineage of the latter, if it had been mangled and deconstructed into its component pieces and then rebuilt as something new and experimental.
Trudging through the primal depths and ascending to celestial highs, Sumac’s latest record is a trek, but for hardened adventures one that offers much reward. The highs are few, but that doesn’t matter as the depths are so compelling, if hazardous.
Essential listening for worshippers of non-standard sonic heaviness.
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