SUMAC
May You Be Held
THRILL JOCKEY
Aaron Turner’s avant-sludge maestros lose their bearings
Sumac’s fourth album oozes space and atmosphere. Aaron Turner’s pressure-valve wall of guitar meat and oscillating sound manipulation are as linear as a housefly’s flight pattern and as heavy as an avalanche. Drummer Nick Yacyshyn and bassist Brian Cook underscore this morbidity with a free-jazz sequencing resembling Naked City’s Grand Guignol album and is as similarly confusing and impenetrable. Yacyshyn makes potent use of cymbal hiss and Cook locks into the fray as best as he can with a bowel-invading rumble. The trouble with May You Be Held is its presentation as a lengthy and loosely stitched noise project with a few hypnotic, but generally unmemorable, riffs and patterns woven into seemingly random spots. Consumed digs out of a hole with a slow-burn crescendo similar to Isis’s Celestial, but too much meandering and a lack of cohesion blankets this in frustration.