What One Becomes
The Northwestern metal band takes a huge leap forward with this impeccably engineered display of doom. Like the trunk of an ancient tree, “Rigid Man” is dense and primeval—its heaving rhythms will leave you picturing a behemoth rolling a boulder up a mountaintop in a thunderstorm. From a squalling haze of noise, “Image of Control” coalesces into a deeply satisfying cudgel-swinging riff. Unlike its doom metal peers, Sumac is never drowsy. Their musical ambitions heat up “Blackout,” a writhing epic that occupies the overlapping territory between Sleep’s stoner metal, Sub Pop’s grunge, and Slint’s scathing math rock.
SUMAC (Aaron Turner on guitar and vocals, Nick Yacyshyn on drums, and Brian Cook on bass) invests in the recursive exercises of chaos and control, which manifest on the band’s second album What One Becomes. The trio’s debut The Deal (2015) revealed a new side of Turner’s combustible songwriting and guitar work, further expanding on his efforts in Isis and Old Man Gloom. On the new album, the trio has elevated the songs’ complexities with a greater entanglement of velocity, density, form, and function. The results are a testament to the tour-honed collective intuition and technical skills of drummer Yacyshyn (Baptists), bassist Cook (Russian Circles, These Arms Are Snakes, Botch) and Turner. The music of What One Becomes requires that each player be attuned to the dynamics and the tension within the multilateral structures. On “Clutch Of Oblivion” the riff develops from a languid desert-rock melody and blossoms into a dense aggregate of rhythm, force, and vigor. A muscular hypno-rock aspiration burns out before reaching escape orbit, and the ensuing plummet of solitary guitar notes lead the band into the realm of introspection before another volley of motorik pummel. “Rigid Man” begins as a lurching epithet that finds the trio in a shadow boxing lockstep for the song’s first half of pugilistic rhythm and noise, only to smash itself on the ground amidst a diabolical feedback whorl from Turner’s guitar and to tear free from the rhythmic underbelly, tapping into the vein of unhinged expressionism howled by Les Rallizes Denudes and Caspar Brotzmann Massaker. There is a profound anxiety that leaches through What One Becomes. SUMAC's choreographed structures parallel the internal and personal struggles with anxiety. They seek to identify the source, devise a course of action, and confront that condition at hand. Turner explains, “Much of it has to do with questioning fabricated structures of identity and what it means when those structures are destabilized by contact with the outside. That has been a unnerving process to undergo, but also fruitful in terms of discovering the path to individuation and realized connection with the self. Another facet of experience I’m working to convey is about living with the sustained presence of anxiety, and avoiding reliance on musical devices of cathartic release to provide escape from this condition.” Sumac channels psychic distress into their rigorously algebraic maneuvers and syllable-crack dissonance. These are an acts of honesty in the face of a particular conduction as well as acutely prescient designs of musical intensity that commands attention to all of this detail.
Sumac, Aaron Turner's post-Isis trio, succeed at making minimalist doom metal because they recall what fans of Isis loved without resembling Turner's past work in the slightest.
With a collective résumé of Isis (the band), Old Man Gloom, Baptists, Botch, and Russian Circles, it would be understandable if Sumac never emerged from the shadow of its members’ past achievements. But the band transcends its supergroup status with What One Becomes. Sumac’s first LP, The Deal, is an angular mindfuck,…
Second LP from post-metal band displays impressive musicianship, but a lack of self-editing holds it back.
What One Becomes is the second album by Sumac, a trio led by Aaron Turner, formerly of Isis.
Former Isis frontman Aron Turner teams up with members of Botch and Baptists for a second album's worth of skull-crushing volume and unrelenting heaviness.
Striking while the iron is hot, Sumac are unleashing their sophomore album, What One Becomes, a little over a year after debut The Deal. The...