The new collaboration between SUMAC and Moor Mother is styled as a crisis in five scenes whose interludes turn cameras on the oppressors or churn truth beneath the stars. The sonics are just as you’d expect from the hard-hitting power trio of Aaron Turner, Nick Yacyshyn and Brian Cook plus the spoken word poet and time-travelling Afrofuturist, with crashing chords and sludgy riffs barrelling away beneath and astride Moor Mother’s snarling and susurrating vocals.
On the first scene and album opener she asks repeatedly, not quite begging the question but issuing an exhortation or call to action with the urgency of a demand ‘does America love you?’ and describes a day in the life of the contemporary citizen ‘at Walmart buying guns just to believe again in a lie that was never true’. Who are the ones buying the guns in today’s America or fearing the overzealous tread of an encompassing state, questions we might ponder as Moor Mother delivers her lines with both an awestruck and petrified wonder while coopting the role of Medusa as she spits with the venom of a rattlesnake.
The second scene is one of mad-frantic running under Munchian skies while the short ‘Hard Truth’ sounds positively cherubic. ‘Scene 3’ is a strange fruit, a nuclear-coded fight for survival as Moor Mother evokes metaphorically the image of an atomic bomb dropped on both our private and collective memories, amid systemic waves of oppression conjuring the harrowing prospect of having to constantly return to lives which are always in the process of being denied and dismantled, a gasping for air over toxic waters and our steeply irradiated earth. Then on ‘Scene 4’ the poet turns quixotically the phrase ‘nobody told me love was reinstated’ without distinguishing between coercion or benefaction, more clearly and with an air of desperate resignation adding ‘nobody told me how love was supposed to be’ or ‘how peace was supposed to be’.
But as the camera light flashes and the post-metal dynamics briefly cease their swirl, together SUMAC and Moor Mother show their penchant for a broader sound palette and moments of quietude or even a kind of soothsaying, still retaining the power to imagine other possibilities and hitherto uncharted worlds. They can be choral and celestial or downright spacey, with ‘The Truth Is Out There’ a synthesis of The X-Files in both motto and theme before The Film closes on one last long and incendiary burnout.
