SUMAC & Moor Mother – The Film
SUMAC and Moor Mother cinematically raise the stakes on their collaborative record, The Film
Turn the appropriate dial back to the Obama-era optimism and growth of 2011, and you’ll find the most people had to be angry about was Metallica and Lou Reed’s Lulu. It was a daring mix of metal and spoken word most analogous to a slam poetry reading and a thrash metal set being booked in adjacent rooms; it was also fearlessly terrible. Flip the dial to the year signified with a skull and crossbones and you’re in the present, with a revisiting of that core premise best described with an enthusiastic sigh. It’s a full realisation of the political fury and intensity that stylistic combination deserved, but we can only be so happy about being told “We’re fucked” in a more artistically robust way. We’re still fucked.
Moor Mother’s delivery matches the pedigree she’s built up, and SUMAC’s swirling, stoner doom is a mystifying cloud of distortion. In terms of Moor Mother collaborations, which peak somewhere around True Opera, The Film reads more like Moor Mother overdubbing someone else’s album rather than a synthesis of styles. We are allowed, however, to throw up our arms, remember how bad Lulu was and how bad we have it now, and let it play. It’s noisy, it’s militant, it’s human, and it’s a time capsule for the year you’re already burning an effigy of. Get it while it’s hot.
Listen to: Scene 2: The Run, Camera, Scene 5: Breathing Fire