*Side Effects May Include: MILD TO MODERATE DEATH*
This is my 2nd favorite Suma album after the S/T. I hear a little Helmet every time i play this album! Super underrated band! Check it out...
Favorite track: hypno assassin.
Marcin Wielewski
Yes, I'm the fu***ng monkey! I can shake my head all the day hearing this noisy doom drilling holes in my brain. This is heavy shit! Going to see them live tomorrow :-)
Favorite track: no, you're the monkey.
Regnārs Breikšs
A much more refined, a lot sludgier and doomier version of their previous endeavour. "Electric Wizard" and "EYEHATEGOD" influences can be heard, but these guys take it to an absolutely new level. If sky is the limit, then this album is on the surface of the Moon!
Azazel ♒ 7293
Oh you guys. Of course we will let churches burn, we'll even fuckin burn them ourselves. Because ugghhh that stuff you just did really lights my soul on fire!
Favorite track: I am the spiritual shepherd.
Bucky
Just stumbled on this one. Holy **cking sh*t! Read the reviews, and have to agree, this album is stellar! Somebody call the preacher the fire department was charred in the church fire.
There are bands that do what they do because they like music. There are bands that do it for the money. There are others that do it as a way of political and social protest.
And there are a select group that do it as a mean of kicking massive ass, melting brains and because THEY ***ING CAN!
Guess in which group is Suma included?
Seriously, Let the Churches Burn is one of the most honest and destroying albums I've heard from the 21st century. This guys have a talent to make anything they play sound like...like rivers of molten lead descending from crimson clouds and covering the entire city.
Let the Churches Burn, the title track, is the best example of this and probably the best song off the album. After 3 minutes of slow build up, there is a precise moment, an atemporal second, when every instrument stops and then a huge, MASSIVE, JUGGERNAUT riff kicks in and destroys your body and soul. That single riff is probably the best way to describe the whole album: a prescence entering the room, oozing an opressive atmoshpere that will probably squash you to the floor and leave only a dark spot were your body used to be. The song shows variety, with a very nice (and unexpected) post-metalish build up at around 7 minutes, in true Isis and Pelican fashion. However, at minute 10, another, even more impressive riff breaks the dreamy section and takes the song back into badassery territory.
Slow, crushing Stoner/Doom metal is what abounds here, but Suma don't limit themselves to only one style. In fact, this guys make time for the more atmoshperic, post-metal sounds which are all over the record (I am the Spiritual Shepherd, Al Quinnab al Hindi, No, you're the Monkey); trippy jamming, sampling n' droning (...Seems you've Developed an Acid Toungue); and even some thrash....wait what? Hypno Assassin sounds like a slowed down version of Exodus and Beef is pure Heavy/Stoner mayhem.
The most impressive thing about this record is the fact that this band...is from Sweden.
Frankly, I can't find any complain about the performance or the production in this album. Every riff is played A LOT, so there's plenty of time to enjoy each one of them and the tone of the guitar is just perfect, drawing as much from Skullflower as from Sleep. The bass is perfectly audible and a major prescence in every song, and the druming is quite good too, with lots of crash work and typical Stoner style.
A chapter apart deserves Jovan, the vocalist. His style is usually a scream in the vein of Electric Wizard, but his performance here is the best suiting I've heard in a Stoner/Doom album, ever.
I'll try to close this one here. The reason why I gave this a 4.5 score is that, in spite of not making anything (very) new, Suma has achieved what could be called the pinnacle of a style. Merging all the popular trends in extreme metal of this decade (Sludge, Drone, Doom, Post-Metal, some Thrash) this people have created a masterpiece. I can't explain how my neck hurt after I banged my head nonstop to the first two songs; how my mind started wandering during the darkness of Blood Pony; how I started solo-pogoing with Beef; how astonished I was with ...Acid Toungue....
....and how excited I was when I started listening from the first song all over again."
-SPUTNIK MUSIC
credits
released April 20, 2006
2LP/CD released by SPEAKERPHONE RECORDINGS.
CD first press : 1000 copies.
CD second press : 1000 copies.
2LP : 500 copies.
>>> our NEW album, THE ORDER OF THINGS was recorded by BILLY ANDERSON in Portland, OR > for a 2016
release.
Hailing from Malmö, Sweden and formed in 2001 : SUMA has been spreading the plague of their sonic weight, noise-ridden hallucinatory doom metal on the world for the past decade and a half. A devastatingly heavy, one way trip into the vortex....more
supported by 44 fans who also own “LET THE CHURCHES BURN”
this their most solid release to date, there other records are all insanely brilliant, you should buy them if you enjoy this for sure. keep kicking ass and putting some of the best sludge this decade. Ryan Graham
supported by 41 fans who also own “LET THE CHURCHES BURN”
Utterly hypnotic, heavy, and ethereal beyond what I can aptly describe here. It'll take you careening down a kaleidoscopic wormhole of audial bliss. cynothoglys
Seattle band Adzes craft sludgy dirges with elements of noise rock, post-metal and shoegaze, united by a staunch moral compass. Bandcamp New & Notable Jun 3, 2020
The latest from this one-man sludge metal project from Baltimore is discordant, spacious, and as heavy as a full group could ever be. Bandcamp New & Notable Nov 12, 2019