On their second album, 2016's What One Becomes, Sumac—the trio led by Hydra Head Records founder and former Isis frontman Aaron Turner—were heading towards a minimalist style that tested doom metal’s spatial limits. By teaming up with Japanese avant-garde pioneer Keiji Haino for American Dollar Bill - Keep Facing Sideways, You’re Too Hideous To Look at Face on, their first collaboration and Sumac’s third record, they’ve taken on a different kind of challenge. Haino is an outsize presence; with his visceral overdrive on guitar, vocals, or any instrument he picks up, he naturally takes over any project he’s on. On this five-track set, that means Sumac primarily functions as a rhythm section, a role in which they excel.
Sumac were already playing slow and loose with structures before, and Haino obliterates any sense of form. His orthodoxy is that there are no orthodoxies, and so Sumac’s lumbering doom becomes an endless outburst of wahs and scrapes. “What Have I Done?...”—a track whose full title runs to 43 words, and which gets split into two parts on opposite ends of this album—has some of the band’s most volatile clusters, rife with overlapping guitar freak-outs and escalating drums. The sound falls in line with Fushitsusha, Haino’s long-running free-rock band, at their most chaotic, and it also recalls the noisy, disassembled grindcore of Sissy Spacek and Burmese.
If Haino is Hendrix caterwauling through the multiverse, Sumac are the Experience bringing him back into our atmosphere, burning without disintegrating. And while Haino and Turner are the marquee names, it’s drummer Nick Yacyshyn who holds it all down. Sumac lets him break free from the steady d-beat hand needed for his other band, Vancouver hardcore group Baptists, loosening up without compromising intensity. That’s even more true on American Dollar Bill, where Yacyshyn has mastered the art of making what could be a complete mess come off as composed and intentional. He doesn’t fall apart, even when you wonder if he’s about to collapse from constant explosion.
For all his influence, Haino hasn’t completely remade Sumac in his image. Both parts of “I’m Over 137% a Love Junkie and Still It’s Not Enough” resemble Sumac’s more tranquil breaks, where Turner punctures lucid drones with squeaks and squalls. Over Haino’s spaced-out twang, they finally simmer. Of course, Haino doesn’t allow for too much peace, letting forth some of his most piercing shrieks when the rest of the band gets quiet. “A Love Junkie” is this collaboration at its most dreamy, yet even the heavier tone of most of the album has its own hazy, disorienting quality. Sumac’s other works have had definite ends and beginnings; American Dollar Bill’s all-enveloping calamity can drift in and out if you’re not listening intently. You don’t go to Haino—or Sumac, for that matter—for easy listening, anyhow.
Haino isn’t new to playing with metal bands: He’s recorded with Boris and plays with metal’s avant emissary, Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley, in Nazoranai. His career has taken a parallel path to many metal groups, exploring new directions in loud, wailing guitars without adhering to rock structures, standards, or attitudes. Even as metal has come closer to the experimental world, he still feels quite far from them. American Dollar Bill bridges that gap, travelling through several extreme languages and still coming out with Haino’s iconoclastic touch.
