Review Summary: Expressive, captivating, and exciting.
SUMAC’s first two albums were fairly straight-forward while featuring top-tier songwriting by the three members, Aaron Turner, Nick Yacyshyn, and Brian Cook. Their latest,
Love in Shadow, establishes a new trajectory for the band, one that seems to be influenced by the work they did with Keiji Haino. The songs have a looser, more improvised feel, while still retaining the careful attention to detail of their previous work.
The opening, nearly 22-minute behemoth “The Task” blisters from the outset and gives plenty of room for the individual members to stretch their instruments to their limits. Cook’s bass is a truly monolithic figure this time around, setting the tone and pace almost taunting Turner and Yacyshyn to keep up, and it ends up being a common thread in each of the four tracks. Yacyshyn not only delivers, but shines just as brightly with a master-class performance on the drums. Turner, however, takes a comfortably back-seat role compared to the other two — even more so than he’s done in both prior albums —, but still weaves his strings as deftly as ever.
Lessons learned from Haino in experimentation and improvisation are found throughout the dense 66-minute runtime. With “Attis’ Blade” and “Ecstasy of Unbecoming,” the middle thirds of both tracks showcase how imaginative and adaptable the musicians can be, even as the bookends are more regimented. “The Task” and “Arcing Silver” save it for the second half, and while the piece in “Arcing Silver” flows naturally from what came before it, the quiet guitar solo in “The Task” falls flat as it leads into a more engaging outro with Turner’s pained croons over a somber organ piano. The improvised sections generally work well, but that piece of “The Task” might have been better served as a bit for live performances, something SUMAC has been known to do.
Turner’s vocals surprise, and though Turner has a less prominent role in the instrumentation, he presents a more gripping and immediate guide through the mass of sounds. At times he trades his usual gruff roars for piercing shrieks that add an unexpected emotional layer not found before in SUMAC’s music, and the result is a far more connective experience.
Love in Shadow is a path chosen at a fork in the road. On the one path is an album that could have been an incremental successor to their first two albums. Instead, Turner, Yacyshyn, and Cook swerved and have delivered something far more expressive, captivating, and exciting.
