Sumac / Moor Mother – The Film

vote
7.5

• Band:
  Sumac
• Duration: 00:58:34
• Available from: 25/04/2025
• Label:

• Thrill Jockey

A record like “The Film” was probably in the air always, underlying the deep artistic and expressive strings of a band like the Sumacs.
It is the potential soundtrack of post-modern existence, within whose alienation and bewilderment, the three Canadians merge their musical research with the path of the African American artist: poet, experimental jazz musician, activist … Moor Mother becomes the perfect voice to build, on the plots of dissonant guitars, able to touch the most drone and dilated moments in this work in the path of the Sumacs, narratives. that affect the heart.
The chosen 'voice' is mainly that of Spoken Word, however declined with an expressive wealth that speaks more of Diamanda Galas – not in terms of extremism, as of power – than not of sung theater. The intersection between the two dimensions, musical and vocal, is almost perfect, a continuous searching and modeling, so that the heaviest songs, with the bass of Brian Cook to hit as a steel maglio, see the poetess to express the torment with its most acidic notes, almost hip-hop in the most historical terms of the genre.
Impossible not to notice a quote in the notes that accompany the album: “'Camera' is a song that speaks of the harsh reality of a revolution not only broadcast on television, but also scrolled, downloading, streaming and filming on mobile phones”. The reference is clearly Gil Scott-Heron and its iconic music poetry, for many considered the zero point of rap, in its most political and cultured meaning, and which is transfigured here in layers of voices, also sampled and made, placed on a layer of noise/jazz/slut almost deafening.
In this frontal and meditated attack, there are moments of pure sonic adrenaline, with the usual accelerations and the roche vocal aggressions of Aaron Turner to report some of the traces of the disc in the Sudge area, in a contrast that increases the sense of estrangement and violence (“Scene 2: The Run”).
The different vocal featuring offer additional elements of estrangement and tension, from the disturbing gorgheggi of Candice Hoyes on “The Truth is out there” to the persuasive, dark romanticism put in place in a rapped form by Kyle Kidd in the following passage; Likewise, in the game of contrasts, the shorter songs interspersed with rumors, effects and experiments – further, to be precise – compared to the Mastodonti in the Sumac tradition which make up the inscalling skeleton of the album.
Until the devastating but necessary explosion of the final “Scene 5: Breathing Fire”: a summa (C) of the whole impact, sound and poetic, which has crossed the eardrums and the soul previously, capable of demonstrating how the high BPMs are not necessarily lightening to pull slaps in the face.
An album to listen to everything in a row, not without effort, given that the low time of duration seems to reverberate on always different strata, divergent, to whom to devote attention listening after listening: it is the usual stylistic figure of the Sumacs, which we have often also found a limit … but which leads the result here, if not to excellence, to a full promotion. And to appreciation for a not easy experimentation, but not trivially 'intellectual'. In short, it is an effort that repays, when we let ourselves be carried in a dimension that definitely goes beyond the boundaries of a 'simple' disk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyskmejyimg