I’m wondering if the purview of these Metal Mondays blurbs have changed. Initially, I think I wanted to share beloved classic albums and make the argument for new classics, but considering how much we’ve focussed on grindcore and metalcore and Nespite (?!), I’m wondering if maybe it isn’t more of a survey of the wonderfully weird corners of the metal hellscape. We’re three months in and we still haven’t touched on Metallica, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest or any of the dozen or so bands who’ve sold a hundred billion records. Oh well, here’s another couple hundred words about a band that surely fewer than 10,000 people give a shit about.
How about some new new for your earholes? This has been a good last couple months for sludge metal, what with this, REZN’s Burden, and Thou’s Umbilical earning raves among 666-friendly corners of the internet. While the Thou and REZN albums are pretty concise sludge (the usually sprawling Thou even keeps their songs under seven minutes and their overall length under 50), Sumac do the opposite: four songs, one hour, no choruses. There’s no getting past it: The Healer is a slog, intentionally so, but a slog all the same.
As a genre, sludge is a less genial version of doom. Taking cues in the from 1980s hardcore bands like Black Flag and Flipper who turned their tempos down to a crawl and the fat, fuzz guitars of grunge, sludge metal really came into its own in the 1990s with Louisiana based bands like Eyehategod, Acid Bath, and Crowbar. They wrote songs about having a bad time that sounded like a bad time. In the 2000s, Hall of Famers like Mastodon and Neurosis would play the sludge sandbox, but the sludge band most relevant to The Healer is now regretfully named Isis, because they share a guitarist, Aaron Turner.
Though pummeling, Isis is almost too atmospheric to be considered sludge. For all their 8-minute songs, double kick drums, and sheets of distorted guitar, listening to Isis is a rather relaxing experience. Some of their music is gosh darn pretty.
That’s not true of Sumac. Turner formed Sumac as an outlet for songs that were too gnarly for Isis. A typical Sumac song starts with waves of distortion and feedback, coalesces around a ramshackle groove, descends into chaos, and returns to a state of primordial feedback. Yes, this is the blueprint for most doom and sludge metal, but what makes Sumac exciting and unique is that most of their music is improvised. They are the Jazz Messengers of extreme music. More than just sludge, Sumac is trying to do something that transcends metal. Like other leftfield godheads Harvey Milk and Sunn O))), Sumac is chasing down something ineffable and artistic, larger than the song itself. As someone who makes music mostly to have a good time, it’s something I respect, even if I wouldn’t pop on The Healer while taking a nice Sunday drive.