Sumac - What One Becomes 2xLP

Label: Thrill Jockey

Sumac invests in the recursive exercises of chaos and control, which manifest on the band's second album What One Becomes. The trio's debut The Deal (2015) revealed a new side of Aaron Turner's combustible songwriting and guitar work, further expanding on his efforts in Isis and Old Man Gloom. On the new album, the trio has elevated the songs' complexities with a greater entanglement of velocity, density, form, and function. The music of What One Becomes requires that each player be attuned to the dynamics and the tension within the multilateral structures.There is a profound anxiety that leaches through What One Becomes. Sumac's choreographed structures parallel the internal and personal struggles with anxiety. They seek to identify the source, devise a course of action, and confront that condition at hand. Sumac channels psychic distress into their rigorously algebraic maneuvers and syllable-crack dissonance. These are an acts of honesty in the face of a particular conduction as well as acutely prescient designs of musical intensity that commands attention to all of this detail.