Review Summary: Because if I knew where cover was I would stay there and never have to run for it.
The respective enterprises of SUMAC and Moor Mother share a doomsday cache of tendencies that might act as repellent to both seasoned and unseasoned listeners. Perhaps it was inevitable that their similarities—an uncompromising artistic bent and a fearless compulsion to experiment—would bring them together in a collaboration that I'm sure nobody outside of their camps even considered putting on paper, a collision of antagonistic temperaments that could only lead to chaos and charred ruins, satisfaction guaranteed to violently vary.
Yeah, nah, and verily.
The Film is that rare kind of collaborative effort that sees both parties' voices enhanced into something distinct, marked by careful restraint and caustic volatility. Its restraint results from generous interplay: Nic Yacyshyn's drums wisely stay silent during the opening drone mantra of "Scene 1"; Moor Mother backs away from the microphone for many a minute of SUMAC's sonic explorations; the guitars, vocals and general noise simmer down when Brian Cook's bass communicates eloquently via timbre manipulation in "Scene 5"; and Aaron Turner's bellowing voice appears for just one show-stopping climax that I'll be sure to hyperbolise about in paragraph twelve.
Anyfuckinghow, this shambles of a website was founded on guitar tabs and men yelling, so I'm sure we're all intimately familiar with the pedigree of SUMAC. Meanfuckingwhile, the peerless story of Moor Mother's musical expansion might have been overlooked by some of the metal-inclined. She honed her slam poetics using the unbound expression of jazz. She then diversified her approach through the unfettered creativity and infinite wordplay of hip-hop. She even expanded her intellect and messaging onto stages alongside members of the London Contemporary Orchestra, weaponising classical music against the Western powers that sired it, railing against the ongoing systemic inequity wrought by colonisation. billy woods once complained that he doesn't want to go see Nas with an orchestra at Carnegie Hall; Moor Mother's clever subversions suggest an alternate path.
Moor Mother's fierce voice breathes life into
The Film. "Scene 1" is an establishing shot, pitting Us against Them in a one-sided conflict where They have all of the power, all of the hatred, and all of the artillery. While the villainous structures that harm humanity are quite clearly the adversary across the album and not always referred to obliquely ("America pissed and shit itself, no diaper"),
The Film's overarching narrative is more of a thematic collage than a hero's journey. You can connect certain parts of the tissue together, but the natural run of Moor Mother's patter makes tracking chronology impossible as words and ideas tumble over each other, reforming and frequently shifting emphasis to modify meaning. Her performances are further modified by an array of vocal processing—layering different registers, pitch shifting, filters, panning, delays, featured backup vocals—that deepen
The Film's sonic signature, particularly in the reprisal of lines spoken across "Scene 3" near its end as the track raises its laggardly hackles and grinds its cracking teeth.
Moor Mother's attention-stealing vocals gain a palpable vehemence for album highlight "Scene 2", which begins with its motif of a deadened and sluggish bass plucking a death knell. This acts as a bedrock to frantically-picked guitars and noise manipulation that occasionally staggers into a viscous sludgedoom headfuck (shoutout to the deservedly revered engineer Scott Evans) and back again, always returning to the gloomy knell, a place of no peace. The final section, though, leaves Moor Mother behind, and takes off into a calculated chaos wherein Yacyshyn's frequent modification of his groove provides a hectic, exultant, and fluctuating apex of intensity. All the while, Turner is ratcheting up his screams into roars, then into wails and whimpers as the smoke clears and the death knell returns once more. It's a seriously visceral track, and I'm choosing to maintain the not-so-romantic notion that Turner's vocal theatrics might be a depiction of a bombing by Them, an event which forms the locus of
The Film's spiralling narrative, the aftermath of which is documented in the deliberately ugly free-form mess that is "Camera".
A bomb falls, and "Camera" bears witness for the world. "We laid out our dead," Moor Mother bluntly states. "Don't look away," she demands. The line is drawn clearly — this is happening, right here on planet earth, and the victims of atrocity dig their loved ones out of the rubble and ask the cameras why, hoping like anything that this won't happen again. It's not enough. Moor Mother has been trying to assist in refocusing people's gazes for years now. It will likely never be enough. The troubled chronology of
The Film reflects this recurring nightmare. Any hope conjured is fleeting, pockmarked with caveats. There is no escape, They'll always hold all the cards, and the bombing will never stop. The sky is always falling.
So it is that I can confidently state that this is serious music made by serious people that is seriously good. My interpretation of its contents might be way off base, but
The Film's form thrives on subjectivity and will no doubt benefit from a range of readings. There are also various gripes ripe for the picking — "Camera", for all its considered significance, strikes me as a compositional weak point where the chemistry almost buckles under the conceit. I've chuckled multiple times at the moment in "Scene 1" that rather inappropriately sounds like a certain noise made by Crazy Frog. I also much prefer the references with deeper roots, the nursery rhymes and fairy tales evoked, to the tonally jarring pop culture references like Blues Clues and E.T., but I suppose the world that we're mourning in real time has room for all of the above. More broadly, I'm sure a number of people will be filtered by the very act of buying into the rather serious schtick here. Fuck'em, and fuck my gripes too. For those who care,
The Film is one to be treasured.
