ALBUM REVIEW: The Healer – Sumac
2024 marks the tenth year of SUMAC‘s career and the band show absolutely no signs of letting up with their vast and all-encompassing music. In fact, with their latest album The Healer, SUMAC take their listeners on an even wilder and more vivid musical journey than ever before.
The trio of guitarist/vocalist Aaron Turner, bassist Brian Cook and drummer Nick Yacyshyn truly let loose throughout the sprawling nature of this album’s four tracks and the results are nothing less than magnificent from beginning to end. The Healer is an extremely vast album and one that takes many sonic twists and turns, but as you listen you realise that no matter how many of these musical twists and turns take place, it never sounds like anyone other than SUMAC, which is exactly where the brilliance of their music lies.
An ominous mixture of comforting feedback, droning noise and the anticipation of instruments gaining traction starts off the opening track World Of Light, and just as you are getting used to the almost stop start feel of things, it kicks into life with possibly the heaviest that SUMAC have ever sounded. From then on in, World Of Light just grows and grows and gives a perfect example of the complexities of the music of SUMAC, simultaneously comforting and crushing throughout.
The following track Yellow Dawn starts with a much more chilled vibe and is a perfect counterpart to what has just preceded it but just as this track puts you in a hazy trance with its trippy nature, the mood changes in the blink of an eye and that creeping SUMAC heaviness takes hold and doesn’t let go until the last notes have disappeared. New Rites quickly resonates with its monolithic grooves and a growing sense of dread that doesn’t escape for the entirety of the track’s 12-minute duration and the improvisation that ends the track is a sublime way to conclude the song for sure, especially in the melancholy way that it does.
The album ends with the simply phenomenal The Stone’s Turner, a song that, again, exemplifies all that is great about SUMAC. It is a track that marries discordant grooves and Turner‘s cathartic and caustic growls with an uplifting and heavy vibe and is done in a truly beautiful way to end things in the most triumphant way.
Simply put, The Healer is a mesmerising collection of music and one that signals that SUMAC are still making even more vital music a decade into their existence. This album marks that milestone in style, plus on the other hand it would appear that the band are still only getting started when it comes to their all-consuming music, and there will be lots left to explore in the next decade too hopefully.
Rating: 8/10
The Healer is set for release on June 21st via Thrill Joceky.
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