Moses Sumney is the Gentle Voice that Popular Music Needs.
Moses Sumney is the type of songwriter that Drake will never be. This is fine for Drake, but bad for us — trust me. Many people who’ve never heard of Moses Sumney before might be surprised by the resonance of his music. For starters, in his songs he utilizes his falsetto in a distinct, almost instrumental way. Sumney doesn’t simply draw out the ends of certain verses, he oscillates from complex lyrical arrangements to non-lexical vocals, producing songs imbued with emotion and variety. The measure of his falsetto has a creeping, idiosyncratic texture that lures you into its darkness. Once immersed you’re drawn under by a soothing refrain, then lost beneath the depths.To this end, his debut album Aromantiscm is equal parts impassioned and poetic.
The first time I heard Moses Sumney’s music I thought of a lonely stoner from Cleveland, Ohio. Kid Cudi doesn’t get credit for pioneering a sort of contemporary hip-hop/blues amalgam, but his early projects launched the genre into a space that normalized music about sadness and depression. Man on the Moon: The End of Day, his first album, was a black hole for Cudi to expel sorrow and grief. Aromanticism’s introduction “Man on the Moon,” is the threshold of an album positioned on a similar frequency. Consider the framing of Cudi’s album: A black boy searches for solace and locates a transformative realm where he can finally be at peace spiritually and emotionally. After giving Aromanticism a few spins I couldn’t get Kid Cudi out of my head. Although, Sumney emphasizes his detachment from love more than anything, there is a comparable sense of escapism that girdles both works. Still, Sumney distinguishes himself through a sound that borrows as much as it creates. This is black-punk with touches of psychedelic rock. It’s the timbre of neo-soul mixed with crooning jazz riffs. It’s the Robert Glasper Experiment distilled into one person.
Moses Sumney is creating an ungendered genre of Black soul.
Sumney’s style is loosely grafted from black Bohemia and monochromatic simplicity. If you saw him on the street he’d seem very Jedi-esque, but the only force he uses is tonal. By tying this spatial minimalism into the acknowledgment of his black skin, Sumney waxes political in the spaces that his lyrics create. He isn’t as overt as an artist like Childish Gambino is on “Terrified,” but where Awaken My Love reaches a profound intellectual depth concerning the nuances of black fear in the context of societal enmity, Aromanticism applies a similar frame to the fragility of interpersonal relationships. On “Quarrel,” Sumney contends “We cannot be lovers/Cause I am the other.” There’s a real understanding of romantic incongruity at the center of his songwriting. Whether those factors are based in economic, or racial differences, he maintains that any type of inequity will eventually undermine love.
Sumney approaches contemporary racial politics with innocuous subtlety. “Quarrel” gently presents the recognition of an impasse between two people who care deeply for one another. He pleads - “With you half the battle/Is proving that we’re at war/I would give my life just for the privilege to ignore.” The aforementioned War flows in one way or another throughout the entire album. For Sumney, his black skin is at times something of a curse and his battles are fielded internally and externally.
Aromanticism carried me into a parallel universe. Sumney’s lyrics are filled with imaginative metaphors and a distinctive turbulence “And the sound of your voice/flows through your body white as noise.” There is a little Sampha in Sumney’s lyrics. He’s honest and delicate. If there was ever a way to be self-deprecating and coy, these two could write the book. The album is vulnerable both emotionally and thematically. It feels like a project that encourages the listener to inject his or herself into its negative spaces, gaps and interstices. And with mentions of love at every turn Sumney doesn’t speak from an overly male perspective. On “Plastic” a song that originally appeared in 2016, he sings “I know what it’s like to behold and not to be held.” Instead of fastening gender specific characteristics to his music Sumney forms an amorphous body of work that selects fluidity over structure and sensuality over lust.
Sumney is content with expressing what drives his contempt instead of providing solutions. Apart from the fact that he doesn’t have all of the answers, his approach is primarily cathartic. The album's midpoint “Lonely World,” is a mournful song that describe this process. The track begins and ends in the same obscure position. He sings of an inescapable void, “Lonely, lonely, lonely face under a veil/ After all the laughter emptiness prevails.” The only noticeable difference in tone is when his voice reaches a shrieking cry towards the songs end. After all it’s varied vocal heights “Lonely World,” ends in hopelessness, exactly where it began. Aromanticism uses stillness to activate the remote and almost interstellar feelings of isolation. The gradually unravelling “Doomed,” is more measured than slow. By allowing his voice to peak at certain heights and then fall silent, Sumney gives his music a peculiar contrast. Instead of layering his voice with synthesizers, an effect that consumed much of his earlier work, he’s fallen back onto his acoustic roots — and I couldn’t be happier.
In Moses Sumney’s world there are no happy endings. Within the ethos he creates on Aromanticism he is incapable of loving. His songs aren’t poetically book-ended, nor does he resolve the tensions that his stories generate. There are no chapters, rather a collection songs meant to articulate his self-contained cynicism. His ballads center around loves failings while simultaneously inducing a lurid sense of seclusion. It’s clear that at one point or another Sumney was struck deeply by the sting of love. He sings, nestled somewhere inside of himself, from a place of intimacy and torment. As the album settles he withholds parts of himself and then slowly peels back the layers to reveal a collection of rapturous whispers — vignettes which lament, inquire, and then disappear into nothingness.
