The Film is a meeting of the minds. Both SUMAC and Moor Mother are experts at wielding their skills for music that’s both brilliant and nauseating. For SUMAC, metal is a destructible aesthetic temple whose parts can be re-sculpted to take any form, so long as the end result is the right blend of disorienting, harsh, and beautiful. Last year’s The Healer saw the trio of post-metal heroes extend their dismal exercises to the brink of woeful drudgery, giving way to rebirth. It was also a big year for Camae Ayewa, better known as Moor Mother: The Great Bailout proved a masterful meditation on Britain’s repeated prostrations to its propertied planter class with a rich tapestry of collaborators. Arguably, The Great Bailout is one of Moor Mother’s darkest releases, and while it inhabits her frequent avant-garde free jazz space, the album feels as oppressive and noisy as a metal release. Now, with The Film, SUMAC’s free doom frames Ayewa’s poetic diatribes, and together, they make for a harrowing listen.
“I want my breath back.” The first time we hear Ayewa’s voice sans manipulation on opener “Scene 1” is a particular knockout. SUMAC’s guitars settle after an opening roar, but they’ll poke at the momentary peace with a sharpness that Moor Mother mirrors with repeated, accelerated incantations: “They don’t believe.” She asks: “Does America love you? Does Germany love you? Does Australia love you? Does England love you?” As the guitars undulate, Ayewa pokes holes in illusions, reckoning with executions, lies, and the daily expressions of violence that keep racial capitalism churning. “Scene 2: The Run” is, itself, a small suite. SUMAC opens with thundering strums while synths flutter, attempting to pick up a signal, leading to a cacophony that’s over as soon as it peaks. SUMAC reenters with a more traditional yet menacing doom performance, setting a furious stage for Moor Mother to race through a dizzying meditation on return. Between repeated utterances of “I was running,” she elaborates where she goes—to the sky, back to herself—with doubt. There’s no stability, and it only gets scarier when Aaron Turner ascends to vocal leadership, growling through his own oratory.
Backing from a metal band doesn’t mean gloom is the only possible mood on The Film. “Scene 4” presents a different outcome: “Space travel galactic mind. Captive needs space. Need to escape the time matrix. / Religious hatred. Love has been reinstated. Has been reinstated.” Ayewa emphasizes: “Nobody told me.” On Earth, everyone with a modicum of power has conspired on how to keep Black people enslaved; no one tells you how to escape. The present is still one marred by the sins of the past that have transformed into everyday monsters, but there’s a suggestion of something else. As subjects lurch for that something else, you get something like “Camera,” a track daring you to witness the revolutions we film on our phones. There’s an awe at the unprecedented ability to process and share the conditions of revolution under intensifying surveillance that’s reminiscent of “Camcorder” or “Tape” off the last Chat Pile album. SUMAC and Moor Mother’s approach is, characteristically, harder to predict, stitched together with report/lecture samples, vocal manipulation, and guitar spasms that scratch the inside of skulls. Interludes like “The Truth is Out There” feel like direct calls from the cosmos. The sources of collective liberation transcend earthly limits.
SUMAC and Moor Mother are at their most powerful when they’re in direct alignment, building and breaking tension synchronously. SUMAC spend much of “Scene 3” at their most subdued, but as they apply more force with every chord and every hit, Ayewa ups the ante. The closer, “Scene 5: Breathing Fire,” sees both chugging on all cylinders, with Ayewa calmly sprinting through verses over SUMAC’s fuzzy dirge. When the two run together, it feels like a proper rush. When SUMAC wanders off halfway through “Scene 5,” it feels murkier: By design, SUMAC’s extended passages beget a hazy, lumbering psychedelia that merges metal and free jazz. Drum rolls trip over each other while the guitar slices the air with a ray of noise. At times, there’s a stoner rock silhouette that feels at odds with Ayewa’s futurisms. The closing few minutes are an entirely new movement, atmospheric and recursive, like a closing prayer. There’s a particular power in their shared quietude.
The Film is presented less as a collection of songs but as a series of spiritually linked exercises that whip up tensions and reveal obscured truths with force and clarity. SUMAC’s unwieldy metal is a fit frame for Moor Mother’s pointed delivery; she sounds like a lone voice of reason in a blazing inferno. When she steps back, SUMAC risks meandering: As much as both artists traffic in unboundedness, there’s whiplash in going from a climax with both acts in sync to an extended guitar-and-feedback meditation. However, their shared energy is contagious when the two are in sync, anywhere on the spectrum, from gossamer to explosive. It’s a listening experience beyond the sum of its parts.
Devon Chodzin is a Pittsburgh-based critic and urban planner with bylines at Aquarium Drunkard, Stereogum, Bandcamp Daily and more. He can be found on social media, sometimes.
