“Earlier this year, Sumac collaborated with the Japenese artist Keiji Haino. Haino’s abstract, free-form approach to music heavily influenced Love in Shadow. What you’ll find, when you open this Pandora’s post-metal box, is an hour of music split into four massive slabs. Structures, pre-rehearsed music is stitched together with passages of improvisation, recorded over five days in a single room, and carefully merged by Kurt Ballou. The goal: “Finding comfort in the negative spaces within each track’s borderland.”” Spaced jam.
Thrill Jockey
Oozing Wound – Whatever Forever Review
“Tipper Gore’s worst fears incarnate. A horrifying concoction of apathy and malaise wrapped in a delectable sheet of hatred, drowned in a bath of contempt represented here by club sauce. Great for parties, ask your caterer for details.” Time to rustle the jimmies.
Liturgy – The Ark Work Review
“Whenever anyone proposes that an artist, album, or condiment is something I’ll “love or hate,” I feel an intense compulsion to remain ambivalent about whatever art, music, or Marmite they’re talking about. “You don’t know me!” my brain spits, “your artificial dichotomy is patently absurd, and I’ll prove it by maintaining a neutral and balanced view!”” Objective, subjective. Love or hate. This is the life of the metal reviewer.
The Body – Christs, Redeemers Review
“Nobody understands The Body. Not even The Body understand The Body. It is a musical gesture pure and simple, with no need to be described and no reason to be judged. It is there and then, with no epistemological meaning whatsoever; it is an artistic expression lying on an imaginary floor deprived of attributes. Or full of attributes, which is the same thing. This duo of pain inflictors from Portland, Oregon, knows how to fiddle with cacophony while, at the same time, titillating your senses with moments of supreme beauty. Not happy with the description?” When Alex gets in a groove, he doesn’t care if you like his descriptions or not. That won’t stop him for waxing poetic all about these sludgesters.
Grumbling Fur – Glynnaestra Review
‘“Why did you start making music?” I asked, while pretending to sip the amazingly cheap red wine in my half-broken glass, scouting for what was left of my dignity while lying on the cold floor. I don’t think he ever gave me an answer, but there are times when Daniel O’Sullivan does not even bother formulating a reply. He breathed out another puff, I turned my head and gave an intoxicated nod to the ceiling while looking nowhere ahead of me. Grumbling Fur’s music is exactly like that whiff. It is not an answer because nobody has ever posed the right question.” If we ever needed someone to decipher that whiff of smoke, you know we’d call Alex to do so. He speaks smoke and obscurity, after all.